Ember Component Focus

This ember-cli addon provides a mixin for adding methods to your Ember components that help you manage the currently focused element.

Proper focus management is essential for making dynamic single-page applications accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies. For example, if you're writing a todo app, you might want to move focus from a creation form to a new todo item when the user submits the form. This addon makes it easy to move focus within a component by handling issues like setting tabindex on elements that aren't focusable by default and removing tabindex="-1" on blur.

Run the following inside your Ember application to install this addon.

ember install ember-component-focus

Or you can install directly from npm:

npm install --save ember-component-focus

Demo

This todo app makes use of ember-component-focus to create an accessible UI.

Usage

To use the focus management methods in your component, you need to mix-in the focusable-component mixin:

// app/components/your-component.js
import Ember from 'ember';
import FocusableComponent from 'ember-component-focus/mixins/focusable-component';

export default Ember.Component.extend(FocusableComponent, {
  // Your component's definition...
});

The mixin adds two properties and two methods to your component.

focusNode Property

The focusNode property allows you to specify the selector of one of your component's child elements that you want to receive focus when one of the methods added by the mixin is invoked. It defaults to null, so override it in your component's definition if you want to set a default element to focus.

componentFocusManager Property

This is a reference to the Focus Manager service that handles interaction with the DOM and listening for DOM events. You probably won't need to use it directly.

focus() Method

The focus() method sets focus on a child element immediately. The element to focus defaults to the value of focusNode, but you can also pass in the child element to focus or a string selector for the element to focus. If you don't pass anything and focusNode is null, focus will move to the component's top element (component.element). This method returns the element that ended up receiving focus.

Example

// When this component is first inserted into the DOM, it will set focus to its
// header element.
export default Ember.Component.extend(FocusableComponent, {
  focusNode: 'h1',

  // ...

  didInsertElement() {
    this._super(...arguments);
    this.focus();
  },

  // ...
});

focusAfterRender() Method

This method works just like focus, accepting the same arguments, but it schedules setting focus for after the next render cycle (using the Ember Run Loop's afterRender queue). This method is most useful for when you want to move focus to a child element that is not yet rendered but will be after the next render cycle. Simply pass it the selector of the element to be rendered. It returns a promise that will be resolved with the element that ends up receiving focus.

Example

// This component will focus the element for a new todo after the model object
// for that todo has been saved and the element representing the todo has rendered.
export default Ember.Component.extend(FocusableComponent, {
  actions: {
    addTodo() {
      let todoName = this.get('todoName');
      let todo = this.store.createRecord('Todo', {name: todoName});
      todo.save().then(() => this.focusAfterRender(`[data-id=todo-${todo.id}]`));
    }
  },

  // ...
});

License

Copyright 2015 LinkedIn Corp. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

Notice

ember is a trademark of Tilde Inc. and is used with permission.