This gist contains a short assignment I'd like everyone to complete before our formal lesson. The prework involves reading some of the React Router documentation, and will allow us to keep the lesson more hands on.
- Fork this gist
- On your own copy, go through the listed readings and answer associated questions
- Comment a link to your forked copy on the original gist
React Router is a library that allows us to make our single page React applications mimic the behavior of multipage apps. It provides the ability to use browser history, allowing users to navigate with forward / back buttons and bookmark links to specific views of the app. Most modern sites use some form of routing. React Router exposes this functionality through a series of components. Let's start by looking at the overall structure of an app using router:
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Take a look at the quick start page of the React Router docs. Take note of the syntax and organization of the page. No worries if this looks unclear right now! (nothing to answer here)
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What package do we need to install to use React Router?
- React-router-dom
- npm install --save react-router-dom
React Router provides a series of helpful components that allow our apps to use routing. These can be split into roughly 3 categories:
- Routers
- Route Matcher
- Route Changers
Any code that uses a React-Router-provided component must be wrapped in a router component. There are lots of router components we can use, but we'll focus on one in particular. Let's look into the docs to learn more.
- What is a
<BrowserRouter />?
- A component of Router that makes use of HTML 5 history API to synce the UI with the browser's url
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
- It makes the app more user friendly, pages can be bookmarked and shared easily by sending a specific URL.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
- It is responsible for rendering some UI when its path matches the current URL
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
- If it has a render prop
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
- It renders the first child that matches the location
- How does it decide what to render?
- It will only render the first component that matches the location
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- Its a navigation element that enables users to navigate between different pages of a React app.
- When a user clicks on a link they are interacting with the link component
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- A subclass of the Link component it adds styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL
- A user would click on a NavLink
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
- It will navigate to a new location automatically.