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?

   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 />?

   • A class of <Router /> that uses HTML5 history API allowing us to use the back/forward buttons to navigate our html file.

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

   • Our apps are web apps (they run is a browser) so BrowserRouter is the appropriate choice.

Route Matchers

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

   • It renders a segment of UI when the <Route /> component's path matches the page's current URL.

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

   • It checks wether the current URL matches the Route component's path.

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

   • Switch renders a single route exclusively. Route components will render with a partial match, on the other hand with Switch only the first child whose path matches will be rendered.

4. How does it decide what to render?

   • It looks for the first child whose path is a match.

Route Changers

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

   • It provides declarative (developer names/creates paths), and accessible (it allows user to access links) navigation for our applications.

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

   • NavLink is a beefed up Link component that allows developers to add styles to the rendered element.
   • The user interact with it the same way they would with a link. NavLink does for more specific scenarios.

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

   • It allows for the user to be navigated to a new URL. Say we have a root url plus some extra route information. With Redirect we can return to the root url and add different extra route information.