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 />? A Router that used the HTML5 history API (pushState, replaceState and the popstate event) to keepyour UI in sync with the URL. normally given an alias of ‘Router’ and this is the parent component that is used to store all of your components. The components are what tell your app which other components to display based on the route. And components are how you create links to those different routes.For web projects, react-router-dom provides and routers. The main difference between the two is the way they store the URL and communicate with your web server.
A uses regular URL paths. These are generally the best-looking URLs, but they require your server to be configured correctly. Specifically, your web server needs to serve the same page at all URLs that are managed client-side by React Router. Create React App supports this out of the box in development, and comes with instructions on how to configure your production server as well.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?When you are switching between the links it lets the user still interact with the webpage.
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What does the
<Route />component do? is a route matcher component wraps our main application routing. Nested within Router will be all of our < Route /> components, which will point to all other URLs -
How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?<Route />elements to find one whose path matches the current URL. When it finds one, it renders that and ignores all others. This means that you should put s with more specific (typically longer) paths before less-specific ones. -
What does the
<Switch />component do? When a is rendered, it searches through its children elements to find one whose path matches the current URL. The Switch component will work much in the same way as the Router component, meaning we will still have nested Route components that need exact paths, etc. Renders the first child or that matches the location. is unique in that it renders a route exclusively (only one route wins). -
How does it decide what to render? when you would need to search throught he childern element you would want to use switch where as if you elements to match the current URL use the Route from my understanding is the parent element and switch will dive in further for nestign so if you need to nest the use switch else use root.
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What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it? Provides declarative, accessible navigation around your application. Link can contain an open and closing tag or be a self-closing tag Link takes a to attribute as well as an optional replace attribute to tells the app which path to redirect to. This can be a string or an object replace is a boolean that when true will replace the current entry in the history stack instead of adding a new one -
What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
A special version of the that will add styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL.
It can take the following attributes:
activeClassName: string - defaults to active activeStyle: object exact: bool strict: bool isActive: func location: object
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
Rendering a will navigate to a new location. The new location will override the current location in the history stack, like server-side redirects (HTTP 3xx) do. This is something that can be used if the user does something wrong. ie. went to a route they don’t have permissions to access.
It can take the following attributes:
to: string to: object push: bool from: string