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Click-Away Listener

The ClickAwayListener component detects when a click event happens outside of its child element.

Example

For instance, if you need to hide a menu dropdown when people click anywhere else on your page:

<ClickAwayListener onClickAway={handleClickAway}>
  <Box sx={{ position: 'relative' }}>
    <button type="button" onClick={handleClick}>
      Open menu dropdown
    </button>
    {open ? (
      <Box sx={styles}>
        Click me, I will stay visible until you click outside.
      </Box>
    ) : null}
  </Box>
</ClickAwayListener>

Notice that the component only accepts one child element. You can find a more advanced demo on the Menu documentation section.

Portal

The following demo uses Portal to render the dropdown into a new "subtree" outside of current DOM hierarchy.

<ClickAwayListener onClickAway={handleClickAway}>
  <div>
    <button type="button" onClick={handleClick}>
      Open menu dropdown
    </button>
    {open ? (
      <Portal>
        <Box sx={styles}>
          Click me, I will stay visible until you click outside.
        </Box>
      </Portal>
    ) : null}
  </div>
</ClickAwayListener>

Leading edge

By default, the component responds to the trailing events (click + touch end). However, you can configure it to respond to the leading events (mouse down + touch start).

<ClickAwayListener
  mouseEvent="onMouseDown"
  touchEvent="onTouchStart"
  onClickAway={handleClickAway}
>
  <Box sx={{ position: 'relative' }}>
    <button type="button" onClick={handleClick}>
      Open menu dropdown
    </button>
    {open ? (
      <Box sx={styles}>
        Click me, I will stay visible until you click outside.
      </Box>
    ) : null}
  </Box>
</ClickAwayListener>

Accessibility

By default <ClickAwayListener /> will add an onClick handler to its children. This can result in e.g. screen readers announcing the children as clickable. However, the purpose of the onClick handler is not to make children interactive.

In order to prevent screen readers from marking non-interactive children as "clickable" add role="presentation" to the immediate children:

<ClickAwayListener>
  <div role="presentation">
    <h1>non-interactive heading</h1>
  </div>
</ClickAwayListener>

This is also required to fix a quirk in NVDA when using Firefox that prevents announcement of alert messages (see mui/material-ui#29080).

Unstyled

As the component does not have any styles, it also comes with the Base package.

import ClickAwayListener from '@mui/base/ClickAwayListener';