It pays to have the Navigator at the root of your application. This allows you to tunnel back and render something at the root. In our case a custom Modal overlay component. You can pass anything on the route object, and anytime you render the same component at the same place it will just re-render that same component. So lets use the power of React to solve our problems.

What are we making

Setup

Lets setup our app

var React = require ( 'react-native' ); var { AppRegistry, StyleSheet, Text, View, Navigator, TouchableOpacity, Animated, Dimensions } = React; var { height: deviceHeight } = Dimensions. get ( 'window' );

We'll get our deviceHeight so we can manually animate our modal up. You could use LayoutAnimation here as well and not deal with getting the deviceHeight but I like Animated so deal with it.

Route Stack

var RouteStack = { app: { component: App } }

This is our super complex route stack. All we do is have a named route with the componet to render.

Root Application

var ModalApp = React. createClass ({ getInitialState : function () { return { modal: false }; }, renderScene : function ( route , navigator ) { var Component = route.component; return ( < Component openModal = {() => this. setState ({modal: true })}/> ); }, render : function () { return ( < View style = {styles.container}> < Navigator initialRoute = {RouteStack.app} renderScene = {this.renderScene} /> {this.state.modal ? < TopModal closeModal = {() => this. setState ({modal: false }) }/> : null } </ View > ); } });

This is the root of our application. Our render function is pretty basic. We render Navigator with our intialRoute being our only Route. Our renderScene function is going to control our logic.

When we render our component we pass down an openModal function. This will set modal:true on our state which will allow for us to open/close the modal over the current route. This will just cause Navigator to re-render at the current route. This means your rendered Component at the current route will have componentWillReceiveProps triggered. Our TopModal will receive a closeModal function to set modal:false on state and unmount our TopModal .

We put our modal after the Navigator so we can render on top of it.

Open Modal

var App = React. createClass ({ render : function () { return ( < View style = {styles.flexCenter}> < TouchableOpacity onPress = {this.props.openModal}> < Text >Open Modal</ Text > </ TouchableOpacity > </ View > ) } });

All we do is when we want to open the modal just call the openModal function on props. That will call up to the function in Navigator renderScene and pop open the modal over the existing app.

The Modal

var TopModal = React. createClass ({ getInitialState : function () { return { offset: new Animated . Value (deviceHeight) } }, componentDidMount : function () { Animated. timing (this.state.offset, { duration: 100 , toValue: 0 }). start (); }, closeModal : function () { Animated. timing (this.state.offset, { duration: 100 , toValue: deviceHeight }). start (this.props.closeModal); }, render : function () { return ( < Animated.View style = {[styles.modal, styles.flexCenter, {transform: [{translateY: this.state.offset}]}]}> < TouchableOpacity onPress = {this.closeModal}> < Text style = {{color: '#FFF' }}>Close Menu</ Text > </ TouchableOpacity > </ Animated.View > ) } });

Here we have a basic modal. We set the translateY to the full device height so that it renders off screen, and on mount we slide it up in 100ms . On close we slide it down, call the closeModal which will trigger the re-render in our renderScene . This case we won't have modal: true set so our TopModal will just unmount.

Done

Hey now go get your modal on. Just remember, React is flexible. Sometimes you need to pass something up to render at the top. Yes slightly a pain, but it's a manageable pain.

Full Code