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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?

React Router using 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.

  1. What is a <BrowserRouter />?

Goes around anything we'd like to use router one. It uses html5 history api that keeps UI in sync with url and allows us to go back and forward on a web page.

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

Keeps track of app history and seperates out pages or concerns

Route Matchers

  1. What does the <Route /> component do? It renders the UI when the URL matches the route

  2. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something? React will render when the route changes.

  3. What does the <Switch /> component do? Only renders the matching path exclusivly, will only render that one path

  4. How does it decide what to render? It looks for a matching path and when it finds one it stops and renders that path exclusivly

Route Changers

  1. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it? Creates a clickable link that the user can interact with that changes the URL and subsequently rerenders the new path

  2. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it? It's the same as link but it add styling attributes to the rendered element.

  3. What does the <Redirect /> component do? It navigates to a new location and overrides the previous location in the histroy stack

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