2001 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 />?

Uses regular URL paths. They are generally the best-looking URLs, but require your server to be configured correctly,

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

So that you can have simply links to different pages of your website.

Route Matchers

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

Goes around the rendering of a specific page. You should put <Route> with more specific (typically longer) paths before less-specific ones.

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

It tries to find the matching URL path.

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

When it finds a route that matches within its children it renders that one and ignores all others.

8. How does it decide what to render?

It searches for the matching URL path.

Route Changers

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

Whenever you use a <Link /> component, an anchor tag will be rendered.

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

The is a special type of <Link> that can style itself as “active” when its to prop matches the current location.

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

Any time that you want to force navigation, you can render a <Redirect>.