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:
-
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)
-
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 />? A type of router that keeps track of HTML5 history API so that the UI stays in sync with the URL -
Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps? Because we want to keep track of where we've been and done on our app so navigation remains in sync with the URL. Browser router seems to keep track of that for us
- What does the
<Route />component do? renders a component if the path matches the current URL - How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something? It looks to see if the path matches what it is looking for and includes that component upon re-rendering. - What does the
<Switch />component do? Switches will render components exclusively, its component and nothing else, normal routes however, are inclusive and will render on top of whatever is already there - How does it decide what to render? Switch will begin looking for paths that match its own and once it does, immediately stops and renders it, similar to how a query selector will find the first instance of a query and go no further
-
What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it? Provides a means for your app to access wherever you place it -
What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it? A type of that will also add special styling attributes on top of what it renders -
What does the
<Redirect />component do? Overrides current location and history to redirect you to a different designated area.