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
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 a router system for React that uses the HTML History API to keep our url in sync with the state of the App.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
So we can type, copy, and paste the classic urls we are used to seeing in order to visit specific 'pages' of our App. The url will be in sync with the state of our components and vice versa.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
Renders it's children when the url matches the path path set in it's properties. The path is defined here for whatever children are contained within.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
If the string after the '/' in the url address matchess the path prop of the Route component then the children in it will be rendered.
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
Wrrpaing Routes in this will make it so only the first component that returns true is rendered and the rest of the remaining componenets are ignored. It is like an if/else statement.
- How does it decide what to render?
The first route that triggers true for the urls path will Render and the rest will be ignored as long as they are wrapped in the same Switch.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
This is like making a button element that when pressed changes the end of the url address in order to take the user to the desired page. The user reads or hears what the link is labeled for and if it is selected the App lods the wanted page.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
This ads a activeClassNameAttribute to our links so that we can ad specific stylings to our links for when they are on the current url. This is used in navigation bars that stay at the top of the page. the current page's link will be highlighted when the url matches that NavLinks path.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
Allows the App to navigate to certain urls if the users does a specific action or types a certain different or incorrect url. This is like an override that directs an user to certain pages when the dev wants them to. Use it for when passwords unlock certain pages or if the password is wrong take the user to the home page. Or if a wrong url is typed in then take the user to the homepage.