Emotion CSS-in-JS - how to add conditional CSS based on component props?

Emotion has a helper called cx that provides functionality similar to the popular classnames library. You can use this to write conditionals more easily:

import { cx, css } from '@emotion/css'

const cls1 = css`
  font-size: 20px;
  background: green;
`

const foo = true
const bar = false

const SomeComponentWithProp = ({ foo }) => (
  <div
    className={cx(
      { [cls1]: foo === 'bar' },
    )}
  />
);

(Adapted from the linked docs)


If you are looking for a way to implement conditional styles with Emotion's css prop, you can do something like this:

import { css } from '@emotion/core';

const styles = ({ isSelected }) => css`
  border: solid 1px black;
  border-radius: 10px;
  padding: 16px;
  cursor: pointer;
  ${isSelected === true &&
  `
    background-color: #413F42;
    color: white;
  `}
`;

const ConditionalComponent = () => {
  const [isSelected, setIsSelected] = useState(false);
  return (
    <div css={styles({ isSelected })} onClick={() => setIsSelected(!isSelected)}>
      Click here to change styles.
    </div>
  );
};

More details on this here: https://seanconnolly.dev/emotion-conditionals


This is a great question. First, avoid this pattern.

const GridCol = props => styled('div')`
  display: block;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  flex: 1 0 0;
  min-width: 0;
  padding: ${props.gutter ? `0 10px` : '0'};
`

In this example, a new styled component is created on every render which is terrible for performance.

Any expression, or interpolation, can be a function. This function will receive 2 arguments: props and context

const GridCol = styled('div')`
  display: block;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  flex: 1 0 0;
  min-width: 0;
  padding: ${props => props.gutter ? `0 10px` : '0'};
`

As for the size prop in your example, I would use the following pattern.

import { css } from 'emotion'

const sizePartial = (props) => typeof props.size === 'string' ?
  css`width: 10%;` :
  css`
   @media screen and (min-width: 500px) {
      width: 20%;
   }


   @media screen and (min-width: 800px) {
      width: 30%;
   }


   @media screen and (min-width: 1100px) {
      width: 40%;
   }
 `

You can then use the partial just like any other function that occurs in an expression.

const GridCol = styled('div')`
  display: block;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  flex: 1 0 0;
  min-width: 0;
  padding: ${props => props.gutter ? `0 10px` : '0'};
  ${sizePartial};
`

This is an extremely powerful pattern that can be used to compose reusable dynamic styles across your project.

If you are interested in other libraries that leverage this pattern check out https://github.com/emotion-js/facepaint and https://github.com/jxnblk/styled-system