Recommended way of making React component/div draggable

Question

I want to make a draggable (that is, repositionable by mouse) React component, which seems to necessarily involve global state and scattered event handlers. I can do it the

Answer 1

The answer by Jared Forsyth is horribly wrong and outdated. It follows a whole set of antipatterns such as usage of stopPropagation, initializing state from props, usage of jQuery, nested objects in state and has some odd dragging state field. If being rewritten, the solution will be the following, but it still forces virtual DOM reconciliation on every mouse move tick and is not very performant.

UPD. My answer was horribly wrong and outdated. Now the code alleviates issues of slow React component lifecycle by using native event handlers and style updates, uses transform as it doesn't lead to reflows, and throttles DOM changes through requestAnimationFrame. Now it's consistently 60 FPS for me in every browser I tried.

const throttle = (f) => {
    let token = null, lastArgs = null;
    const invoke = () => {
        f(...lastArgs);
        token = null;
    };
    const result = (...args) => {
        lastArgs = args;
        if (!token) {
            token = requestAnimationFrame(invoke);
        }
    };
    result.cancel = () => token && cancelAnimationFrame(token);
    return result;
};

class Draggable extends React.PureComponent {
    _relX = 0;
    _relY = 0;
    _ref = React.createRef();

    _onMouseDown = (event) => {
        if (event.button !== 0) {
            return;
        }
        const {scrollLeft, scrollTop, clientLeft, clientTop} = document.body;
        // Try to avoid calling `getBoundingClientRect` if you know the size
        // of the moving element from the beginning. It forces reflow and is
        // the laggiest part of the code right now. Luckily it's called only
        // once per click.
        const {left, top} = this._ref.current.getBoundingClientRect();
        this._relX = event.pageX - (left + scrollLeft - clientLeft);
        this._relY = event.pageY - (top + scrollTop - clientTop);
        document.addEventListener('mousemove', this._onMouseMove);
        document.addEventListener('mouseup', this._onMouseUp);
        event.preventDefault();
    };

    _onMouseUp = (event) => {
        document.removeEventListener('mousemove', this._onMouseMove);
        document.removeEventListener('mouseup', this._onMouseUp);
        event.preventDefault();
    };

    _onMouseMove = (event) => {
        this.props.onMove(
            event.pageX - this._relX,
            event.pageY - this._relY,
        );
        event.preventDefault();
    };

    _update = throttle(() => {
        const {x, y} = this.props;
        this._ref.current.style.transform = `translate(${x}px, ${y}px)`;
    });

    componentDidMount() {
        this._ref.current.addEventListener('mousedown', this._onMouseDown);
        this._update();
    }

    componentDidUpdate() {
        this._update();
    }

    componentWillUnmount() {
        this._ref.current.removeEventListener('mousedown', this._onMouseDown);
        this._update.cancel();
    }

    render() {
        return (
            

                {this.props.children}
            
        );
    }
}

class Test extends React.PureComponent {
    state = {
        x: 100,
        y: 200,
    };

    _move = (x, y) => this.setState({x, y});

    // you can implement grid snapping logic or whatever here
    /*
    _move = (x, y) => this.setState({
        x: ~~((x - 5) / 10) * 10 + 5,
        y: ~~((y - 5) / 10) * 10 + 5,
    });
    */

    render() {
        const {x, y} = this.state;
        return (
            
                Drag me
            
        );
    }
}

ReactDOM.render(
    ,
    document.getElementById('container'),
);

and a bit of CSS

.draggable {
    /* just to size it to content */
    display: inline-block;
    /* opaque background is important for performance */
    background: white;
    /* avoid selecting text while dragging */
    user-select: none;
}

Example on JSFiddle.