reactjs - How can I create a clickable first option in Material UI Labs Autocomplete

Question

Below you can find an example from the MUI docs on Autocomplete where I've passed a link to google, prior to the options list. However, I can't click that option, the event target is just the MuiAutocomplete, rather than the <a> I'm passing.

import React from "react";
import TextField from "@material-ui/core/TextField";
import Paper from "@material-ui/core/Paper";

import Autocomplete from "@material-ui/lab/Autocomplete";

const Link = ({ children }) => (
  <Paper>
    <a href="https://www.google.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
      Go to Google
    </a>
    {children}
  </Paper>
);

export default function ComboBox() {
  return (
    <Autocomplete
      id="combo-box-demo"
      options={top100Films}
      getOptionLabel={option => option.title}
      style={{ width: 300 }}
      renderInput={params => (
        <TextField {...params} label="Combo box" variant="outlined" fullWidth />
      )}
      PaperComponent={Link}
    />
  );
}

https://codesandbox.io/s/material-demo-egi6p

Interestingly, passing open to the autocomplete

    <Autocomplete
      open // add this prop
      id="combo-box-demo"
      options={top100Films}

allows this to work as expected.

Currently, I'm using a onMouseDown to make this work but feel this is possibly a bad solution.

Answer 1

You can fix this by adding:

      onMouseDown={event => {
        event.preventDefault();
      }}

to your link so that your Link component looks like:

const Link = ({ children, ...other }) => (
  <Paper {...other}>
    <a
      onMouseDown={event => {
        event.preventDefault();
      }}
      href="https://www.google.com/"
      rel="nofollow"
      target="_blank"
    >
      Go to Google
    </a>
    {children}
  </Paper>
);

A separate fix that I've included is passing through any additional props to the Paper component (via ...other). The Popper component passes props to the Paper component that control its positioning, so the positioning will be incorrect without this change.

The reason why event.preventDefault() is necessary, is because the focus is on the input prior to the click. One of the default effects of the mouse-down would be to change focus from the input to the link. The onBlur of the input would trigger a close of the listbox portion of the Autocomplete which means the link would no longer be present and it would not continue on to the onClick behavior of the link. Calling event.preventDefault() prevents the focus change from occurring.