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?
`npm install 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 />?
It is Router that runs in place of the browser navigation. It uses the browsers actual history to track the different 'pages', as well as letting the user navigate using it as well. All the while, the browser has not had to refresh or navigate to a different page at all.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
It leads to a much smoother user experience of a website, as well as enables certain transitions very easily. It also simplifies the transfer of information from the state of one 'page' to another.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
It is a switch that is based on the tail end of the URL. In order, it goes parses through the possible paths and displays all matches.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
There are 2 ways: exact and ... normal, I guess. Exact is just that: 100% identical. Nothing is in the url that isn't also in the string, and vice versa. Normal has to have a complete match contained in the url, but the url can contain extra.
7. What does the <Switch /> component do?
A switch is a way to render exclusively one Route.
- How does it decide what to render?
It runs until it finds the first matching Route. Then it stops searching and renders it.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It builds an anchor tag with an appropriate href property. A user can click on it, and it will navigate to that url. It also can pass information through different properties, even a prop.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It is a specialized Link. It does the same thing, except it has specialized styling when the user is currently on the page that it links to.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
It acts like a server 3xx response, and redirects to a different web page.