Build WordPress Client App with React Native #16 : Dark theme

This series intends to show how I build app to serve content from my WordPress blog by using react native. Since, my blog is talking about react-native, the series and the articles are interconnected. We will learn how to set-up many packages that make our lives comfortable and learn how to deal with WordPress APIs. Here, the most prominent features talked about in the book are the dark theme , offline mode, infinite scroll and many more. You can discover much more in this series.this inspiration to do this tutorial series came from the React Native App Templates from instamobile

In case of wanting to learn from the beginning, all the previous parts for this tutorial series are available below:

In this chapter, we are going to implement a new feature in our app. The feature is called dark mode which is very prevalent in the app nowadays. The dark mode is configured into any app to make it night friendly or low light friendly. In order to implement the dark mode into our react native application, we are going to use the features of react-navigation and react-native-paper. This will make it easier to trigger the dark mode manually through the app itself.

We are going to implement the Settings screen in which there will be a switch to trigger on and off the dark mode. We are also going to make use of the react-native-dark-mode package. Finally, we are going to implement the configuration by which the app will automatically go into dark mode when switching into dark mode in the device itself.

Moving Navigation code

We might remember that we have all our navigation code in the App.js file. Keeping the navigation configuration in the App.js file is not suitable for large applications. So now, we are going to move the navigation code into different files.

First, we need to create a directory called ‘./components/’ in the ‘./src/’ folder. Then, we need to create a new file called Navigator.js in the ‘./src/components/’ folder. Then, we need to copy all the navigation codes from the App.js file to the Navigator.js file as shown in the code snippet below:

import React from 'react';
import {createAppContainer} from 'react-navigation';
import {createBottomTabNavigator} from 'react-navigation-tabs';
import {createStackNavigator} from 'react-navigation-stack';
import Home from '../screens/Home';
import Categories from '../screens/Categories';
import Setting from '../screens/Setting';
import About from '../screens/About';
import SinglePost from '../screens/SinglePost';
import CategorieList from '../screens/CategorieList';
import Contact from '../screens/Contact';
import Bookmark from '../screens/Bookmark';
import Ionicons from 'react-native-vector-icons/Ionicons';

const DashboardTabNavigator = createBottomTabNavigator(
  {
    HomePage: {
      screen: Home,
      navigationOptions: {
        tabBarLabel: 'Home',
        tabBarIcon: () => <Ionicons name="md-home" size={30} />,
      },
    },

    Categories: {
      screen: Categories,
      navigationOptions: {
        tabBarLabel: 'Categories',
        tabBarIcon: () => <Ionicons name="md-apps" size={30} />,
      },
    },
    Bookmark: {
      screen: Bookmark,
      navigationOptions: {
        tabBarLabel: 'BookMark',
        tabBarIcon: () => <Ionicons name="ios-bookmark" size={30} />,
      },
    },

    Setting: {
      screen: Setting,
      navigationOptions: {
        return {
          tabBarLabel: 'Setting',
          tabBarIcon: () => <Ionicons name="md-settings" size={30} />,
        };
      
    },
  },
  {
    navigationOptions: ({navigation}) => {
      const {routeName} = navigation.state.routes[navigation.state.index];

      return {
        headerTitle: routeName
      };
    },
  },
);

const StackNavigator = createStackNavigator({
  DashboardTabNavigator: DashboardTabNavigator,
  SinglePost: SinglePost,
  CategorieList: CategorieList,
  Contact: Contact,
});


export default createAppContainer(StackNavigator);

Now, we are going to include the navigator component back to App.js. For that, we need to import the Navigator.js file into the App.js file as Navigator and use it in the render() function as shown in the code snippet below:

import React, {Component} from 'react';
import Navigator from './src/components/Navigator';
class App extends Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = {};
  }

  render() {
    return <Navigator />
  }
}

export default App;

Activate dark mode in React navigation

Here, we are going to activate the dark mode in the react-navigation. The react-navigation package provides us with a prop called theme through which we can easily change into dark mode. For that, we need to use the theme prop in the Navigation component that we are exporting from the Navigator.js file as shown in the code snippet below:

const Navigation = createAppContainer(StackNavigator);
export default () => <Navigation theme={'dark'} />

Here, we integrated the theme prop to the component we are exporting from Navigator.js file with theme as dark.

Hence, we will get the dark mode in the app interface as shown in the emulator screenshots below on the next page:

As we can see, we have activated the dark mode in the app interface but the cards displaying the article posts are still in white theme. For that, we need to configure the react-native-paper components as well.

Activate dark mode on React native paper

Here, we are going to activate the dark mode in the components from the react-native-paper package. We are going to make use of the Provider component from react-native-paper as PaperProvider in the Navigator.js file. We are also going to import the DarkTheme and DefaultTheme from the react-native-paper component as shown in the code snippet below:

import {
  Provider as PaperProvider,
  DarkTheme,
  DefaultTheme
} from 'react-native-paper';

Here, Provider component is the main Context class that makes the global config of dark mode. The DarkTheme and DefaultTheme are set of configurations. Now, we need to wrap the Navigation component that we are exporting from the Navigator.js with the PaperProvider component. And then, integrate it with the theme prop set to DarkTheme component as shown in the code snippet below:

export default () => {
  return (
    <PaperProvider theme={DarkTheme}>
      <Navigation theme={'dark'} />
    </PaperProvider>
  );
};

Hence, we will get the following result in our emulator screens on the next page:

As we can see, we now have the dark mode activated in the article post cards as well. But, we can also see that there is some issue with the excerpt of the article that is being displayed in the cards. All the letters in the excerpt are in black color style. This is because we used the component from react-native-render-html package.

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to configure the dark mark to our react native app in both Android and iOS. First, we learned how to enable the dark mode theme in the project using the theme prop provided by the Navigation component.

Also published on Medium.