2006 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.

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!

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 />?

   • A Router that uses the HTML5 history API to keep the UI in sync with the URL.

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

   • Because we're using our app in the broswer

Route Matchers

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

   • It will require a path and something to render and then when the URL matches it's file path that componenet will be rendered.

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

   • When called upon it will search for the first URl that matches the path and render that component.

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

   • It'll find the component who's path matches the URL and render that one. So if our Homepage route was "/" and our Movie route was "/movie" and we entered the url with just "/" at the end route will match to Homepage. If we entered "/movies" this could match to Homepage or Movies because they both have the "/" at the begining but Switch will look for the EXACT match, so Movie would be the route.

8. How does it decide what to render?

   • It'll find the component who's path matches the URl and only render that one.

Route Changers

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

   • Creates a clickable link that when the user clicks it will re-route to the URL path inside the Link tag.

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

    • I believe it's super similar to the component in that it's a clickable link and can be active.

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

    • Forces nagivation to a path without a user interaction. I've seen this with error pages, if I get an error sometimes it'll redirect me to another page without me, a user, doing anything or having any say.