The initial goal was to build a dropdown menu. But it presents the opportunity to think about this build and how can optimized to be easily reusable.

The only external library I used on this build was SASS.

There are two additional items on the menu, so it shows the possibility of using different types of items, like anchors and buttons.

• Left and right alignment
• Conditional rendering
• Multiple types of menu items
• Multi-language availability
• Color scheme using variables

The left and right alignment can be easily defined with the align prop on the component. In this build I left it binded with a state so it's possible to be changed with the click of a button. In an application, the developper just need to select a side and pass it as the align prop.

<Dropdown align="left" />

<Dropdown align="right" />

It was possible to use some simple CSS animations into this build, using state-conditional classes, but I prefered to use conditional rendering so it can be easily linked to an animation library, such as Framer Motion. When something is not displayed, I prefere not to leave them hidden on the DOM.

It was required that the menu would allow using other types of items, such as buttons and anchors. So I used a scalable aproach using an array and the map method.

It gathers all the items that will be rendered in the menu as objects with three different properties:

• NAME - the name that will be displayed on the menu;
• TYPE - It describes the type of the item, it can be either "function", "anchor", or "button":
  • Function: Will trigger the callback function declared on the ACTION property.
  • Anchor: Will follow the URL declared on the ACTION property;
  • Button: Will create a button that will trigger the callback function declared on the ACTION property.
• ACTION - It declares the functions that will be triggered on the onClick event or the URL that will be followed by the anchor.

By using an array to build the menu, it's possible to import an array from somewhere else, including a multi-language package.

It turns easy the implementation of different color themes, using Styled Components for instance.

I created some tests for the component using the React Testing Library so it's possible to see that the basic structure of it is working well.

• @joaolavelino