2006 React-Router-Prework.md

React Router Prework

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.

Instructions

1. Fork this gist
2. On your own copy, go through the listed readings and answer associated questions
3. Comment a link to your forked copy on the original gist

Questions / Readings

Router Overview

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:

1. 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)

2. What package do we need to install to use React Router?

• The necessary package is react-router-dom.

Router Components

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

Routers

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.

3. What is a <BrowserRouter />?

• It is a type of <Router> that makes use of the HTML5 history API in order to keep the UI in sync with the URL.

4. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps?

• If we want to be able to make use of the "back" and "forward" buttons in the browser, then we would need to keep track of <BrowserRouter /> in order to achieve this.

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do?

• The <Route /> component allows you to render some UI to the page when its path attribute matches the URL.

6. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something?

• It will look at the current URL and see if it matches the path attribute. If it does, then it will render that component's children.

7. What does the <Switch /> component do?

8. How does it decide what to render?

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it?

10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it?

11. What does the <Redirect /> component do?