Carousel

A responsive image carousel.

Introduction

The Material Design Lite Ext (MDLEXT) Carousel, commonly also referred to as “slide shows” or “sliders”, is a component for cycling through a series of images. The carousel is defined and enclosed by a container element and distributes images horizontally, with repect to the available container size. Images outside the container viewport slides into view, triggerd by a user action or by running an animation loop (rAF).

This component does not attempt in any way to resemble a three-dimensional image carousel that is used to show slides from a projector. The component is perceived more as a slider, but the terms slider and carousel, are often used interchangeably.

Features:

• Navigate carousel using keyboard (arrow keys, tab, pgup, pgdown, home, end), mouse drag, touch events, or by sending custom events to the carousel (first, scroll-prev, prev, next, scroll-next, last, play, pause)
• Select a particular image using enter or space key, or by clicking an image
• Cycle images at a given interval - a slideshow
• Set slideshow interval via a data attribute or as a part of the play custom event
• Stop slideshow via custom event (pause) or by a user interaction, e.g clicking an image
• User interactions via keyboard, mouse or touch events may be blocked, if configured
• Start slideshow at component initialization using a data attribute
• The carousel emits custom events reflecting a user action. E.g. clicking an image will emit a 'select' event with a detail object holding a reference to the selected image.

Limitations:

• The carousel should pause any running animation on window.bur or tab.blur - not implemented
• The carousel should pause any running animation when the carousel is not in window viewport - not implemented
• Only horizontal layout in first release

To include a MDLEXT carousel component:

 1. Code a block element, e.g. a <div> element, to hold dimensions of the carousel.

<div style="height: 200px; width: 100%;">
</div>

 2. Code a <ul> element with class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel" to hold the carousel.

<div style="height: 200px; width: 100%;">
  <ul class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel">
  <ul>
</div>

 3. Code a <li> element with class="mdlext-carousel__slide" to hold an individual image (thumbnail).

<div style="height: 200px; width: 100%;">
  <ul class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel">
    <li class="mdlext-carousel__slide">
    <li>
  <ul>
</div>

 4. Code a <figure> element to hold the image and the image title.

<div style="height: 200px; width: 100%;">
  <ul class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel">
    <li class="mdlext-carousel__slide">
      <figure>
      </figure>
    <li>
  <ul>
</div>

 5. Inside the <figure> element add an <img> element with reference to the thumbnail image to be shown. Optionally add a <figcaption> element to hold the image title.

<div style="height: 200px; width: 100%;">
  <ul class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel">
    <li class="mdlext-carousel__slide">
      <figure>
        <img src="_D802591.jpg" title="Whooper swans in flight"/>
        <figcaption>_D802591.jpg</figcaption>
      </figure>
    <li>
  <ul>
</div>

 6. Repeat steps 3..5 for each slide required.

Examples

• See: snippets/carousel.html
• Or try out the live demo

Interactions

Keyboard interaction

The carousel interacts with the following keyboard keys.

• Tab - When focus is on a slide, pressing the Tab key moves focus in the following manner:
  • If there is a next slide, focus moves to the next slide.
  • If focus is on the last slide, focus moves to the first focusable element outside the carousel component.
• Shift+Tab - Generally the reverse of Tab.
• Left arrow - Moves focus to the previous slide. If the current slide is the first slide, focus stays on that slide.
• Right arrow - Moves focus to the next slide. If the current slide is the last slide, focus stays on that slide.
• Up arrow - behaves the same as left arrow.
• Down arrow - behaves the same as right arrow.
• End - When focus is on a slide, an End key press moves focus to the last slide.
• Home - When focus is on a slide, a Home key press moves focus to the first slide.
• Enter/Space - When focus is on a slide, pressing Enter or Space selects the focused slide.

Mouse / Touch interaction

• Drag or Swipe left - Move slides outside container viewport into view.
• Drag or Swipe right - Move slides outside container viewport into view

Component configuration

The component can be configured using a data-config attribute. The attribute value is a JSON string with the following properties.

The data-config attribute must be a valid JSON string. You can use single or double quotes for the JSON properties.

Example 1, single quotes in JSON config string:

<ul class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel mdl-js-ripple-effect mdl-js-ripple-effect--ignore-events" 
  data-config="{ 'interactive': true, 'autostart': false, 'type': 'slide', 'interval': 2000 }">
  ......
</ul>

Example 2, double quotes in JSON config string:

<ul class="mdlext-carousel mdlext-js-carousel" 
  data-config='{ "interactive": false, "autostart": true, "type": "scroll", "interval": 5000 }'>
  ......
</ul>

Events

Interaction with the component programmatically is performed by sending events to the component, and receive responses from the component.

Events the component listenes to

A client can send a command custom event to the carousel. The command event holds an action detail object defining the action to perform.

new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'first' } });
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'scroll-prev' } });
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'prev' } });
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'next' } });
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'scroll-next' } });
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'last' } });
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: 
  { 
    action : 'play', 
    interval: 3000   // Interval is optional, overrides value set by 'data-config'
  } 
}); 
new CustomEvent('command', { detail: { action : 'pause' } });

// Trigger the event
myCarousel.dispatchEvent(ev);

Refer to snippets/lightbox.html for usage.

Events emitted

When a user interacts with the component, or the component receives a command custom event, the component responds with a select custom event reflecting the action performed and a detail object holding the selected slide element.

The select detail object has the following format:

detail: {
  command, // The command executed (`first`, `scroll-prev`, `prev`, `next`, `scroll-next`, `last`) 
  keyCode, // Key pressed, if any 
  source   // The element that caused the event
}

Set up a select listener.

document.querySelector('#my-carousel').addEventListener('select', function(e) {
  var selectedElement = e.detail.source;
  console.log('Selected element', selectedElement);
  var selectImage = selectedElement.querySelector('img');
});

Refer to snippets/lightbox.html for usage.

Public methods

stopAnimation()

Stops animation - if any.

upgradeSlides()

Upgrade slides. If you add slides to the carousel after the page has loaded, you must call upgradeSlides to notify the component about the newly inserted slides.

myCarousel = document.querySelector('#my-carousel');
myCarousel.MaterialExtCarousel.upgradeSlides();

getConfig()

Returns the config object.

Configuration options

The MDLEXT CSS classes apply various predefined visual and behavioral enhancements to the carousel. The table below lists the available classes and their effects.

Attributes.

Note for single page applications

If you use Material Design Lite in a dynamic page, e.g. a single page application, any running animations must be stopped before a page frament containing a carousel component is removed from the DOM. Call componentHandler.downgradeElements to stop any running animation and clean up component resources. In a static web application there should be no need to call componentHandler.downgradeElements.

The following code snippet demonstrates how to properly clean up components before removing them from DOM.

// Call 'componentHandler.downgradeElements' to clean up
const content = document.querySelector('#content');
const components = content.querySelectorAll('.is-upgraded');
componentHandler.downgradeElements([...components]);

// Remove elements from DOM.
// See: http://jsperf.com/empty-an-element/16
const removeChildElements = (element, forceReflow = true) => {
  while (element.lastChild) {
    element.removeChild(element.lastChild);
  }
  if(forceReflow) {
    // See: http://jsperf.com/force-reflow
    const d = element.style.display;
    element.style.display = 'none';
    element.style.display = d;
  }
}

removeChildElements(content); 

How to use the component programmatically

The tests and the snippets/lightbox.html code provides examples on how to use the component programmatically.

Reference

WCAG Carousel Concepts