Programatically hiding and showing individual tabs in React Native Router Flux Tabbar - react-native

Question

I have a tabbar in my app using React Native Router Flux. There are a couple use cases where hiding or showing specific tabs based on the current user would be very helpful. The main ones I have run into are:
AB testing new tabs to specific users
Showing a special admin tab to certain users with certain privileges
The react-native-router-flux library does not support any options to do this from what I can see. How can I achieve this functionality?

Answer 1

The default tabbar component in react-native-router-flux is just the component from the react-navigation-tabs library. You can import this component directly into your code, customize as needed, and then pass it to react-native-router-flux through the tabBarComponent prop (documented here).
I created a new component, which you should be able to copy directly and just change the logic for actually hiding the tabs based on your state:
import React from 'react'
import { BottomTabBar } from 'react-navigation-tabs'
import { View, TouchableWithoutFeedback } from 'react-native'
import { connect } from 'react-redux'
const HiddenView = () => <View style={{ display: 'none' }} />
const TouchableWithoutFeedbackWrapper = ({
onPress,
onLongPress,
testID,
accessibilityLabel,
...props
}) => (
<TouchableWithoutFeedback
onPress={onPress}
onLongPress={onLongPress}
testID={testID}
hitSlop={{
left: 15,
right: 15,
top: 5,
bottom: 5,
}}
accessibilityLabel={accessibilityLabel}
>
<View {...props} />
</TouchableWithoutFeedback>
)
const TabBarComponent = props => (
<BottomTabBar
{...props}
getButtonComponent={({ route }) => {
if (
(route.key === 'newTab' && !props.showNewTab) ||
(route.key === 'oldTab' && props.hideOldTab)
) {
return HiddenView
}
return TouchableWithoutFeedbackWrapper
}}
/>
)
export default connect(
state => ({ /* state that you need */ }),
{},
)(TabBarComponent)
And then simply imported and used that in my Tabs component:
<Tabs
key="main"
tabBarComponent={TabBarComponent} // the component defined above
...
Detailed look at where these things are getting passed to
Looking at the line of the source of react-native-router-flux, it is using createBottomTabNavigator from the react-navigation library, and passing no component if you do not pass a custom tabBarComponent. The createBottomTabNavigator method in react-navigation comes from this line of the library, and is actually defined in react-navigation-tabs. Now, we can here see in react-navigation-tabs that if no tabBarComponent has been passed, it simply uses BottomTabBar, also defined in react-navigation-tabs. This BottomTabBar, in turn, takes a custom tab button renderer through props, called getButtonComponent.