title: Tip: Disabling Links As Buttons in Gatsby published: true description: How to use Link as a button and disable it. tags: #javascript #gatsby #react #webdev
I was working on my Gatsby blog project today and ran into a little quirk. I wanted navigation buttons to let the user go to the next and previous posts in the blog. I wanted those buttons to be Gatsby Links. Simple enough, right? However, when the user reaches the very first post or the very last, I wanted said button links to be disabled.
For example:
<Link
disabled={!nextPost}
className="button"
to={nextPost ? nextPost.node.fields.slug : "/"}
>Next Post</Link>
See, if nextPost is falsy, the Link should be disabled. Except, in practice I found that despite it appearing disabled it still can be clicked and fired off. And it will sling them to the index page of the site.
After a little digging around Google, I figured out this neat trick. It required I add this class to my CSS.
.disabled-link {
pointer-events: none;
}
After that I just needed a ternary statement put this before the component’s return JSX.
const disabledNext = nextPost ? "" : "disabled-link"
To finish, I morphed my Link button into this:
<Link
disabled={!nextPost}
className={`button ${disabledNext}`}
to={nextPost ? nextPost.node.fields.slug : "/"}
>Next Post</Link>
The .disabled-link CSS class makes it so it can’t be clicked at all, returning the disabled functionality to it that I intended. Bing, bang, boom!