Charles Wefso 2003 React Router Prework

2003 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 --save react-router

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 />?

*<BrowserRouter /> is the parent component used to store all of the <Route /> components. It uses regular URL paths. *

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

We use this to keep our URL in sync with our UI. We may choose to use this component because it comes built-in with create-react-app and the URLs look the best.

Route Matchers

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

*The Route component is responsible for rendering a different UI components when the path of the URL is matched. Each of these components has multiple render methods, as well as built-in props such as the 'match' prop which contains informationa about the route path. *

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

If the path of the <Route />'s URL matches the desired URL it will render the things contained in that <Route /> component.

7. What does the <Switch /> component do? The <Switch /> component contains all of the <Route /> components and is responsible for finding which <Route /> to render.

8. How does it decide what to render? The <Switch /> component searches through all of its children <Route /> components to find one whose URL matches the desired URL. It then renders only the components contained in that <Route /> and ignores all of the other Routes.

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it? *The <Link /> component creates an href tag that can be used to force the page to render a particular as specified by the path in the <Link />. *

10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it? The <NavLink /> component is used and interacted with in a similar way to <Link />, but it allows us to give special styling to the element when the link is "active." We can use the extra attribute called activeClassName that we can use to specify the styling for the element.

11. What does the <Redirect /> component do? The <Redirect /> component overrides the current location with a new location and renders a new <Route />. It mimics a server-side redirect. It looks like it is most often used with conditional logic to determine if a redirection is necessary.