Corbin March 2003 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?

• npm install 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 />?

• BrowserRouter is used for clientside routing that uses URL segments to go to different pages off of a root URL.

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

• It is used to organize all of our routing components creating logic for which segments of a page are presented and when.

Route Matchers

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

• Route actually renders each component on the page based on the presentational logic written around the routing logic.

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

• Typically there is logic written around the routing using Link tags that act similar to the tags but reroutes to a new page.

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

• Switch in routing looks for one of its routes' conditions to be met. Once one of the routes conditions are met it will redirect the user to that page and sieze looking for any more conditions.

8. How does it decide what to render?

• Based off of the logic of the dev this can be used by a button or logic tied to it that will redirect to the corresponding page upon prerequisites being met.

Route Changers

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

• Link tags work like tags in vanilla JS it makes an element clickable and can have logic tied to it that will then redirect to a new page.

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

• The NavLink is used for styling purposes used in conjunction with Link you can set an activeClass attribute that allows you to set different styling to a navbar for each page that a user is on.

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

• Redirect allows us to create conditional logic that will redirect and render a new page or display upon certain criteria being met.