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.
- Fork this gist
- On your own copy, go through the listed readings and answer associated questions
- Comment a link to your forked copy on the original gist
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:
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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)
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What package do we need to install to use React Router?
Run this installation command in the Terminal npm install react-router-dom
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
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.
- What is a
<BrowserRouter />?
It is a Router component that uses URL paths to communicate with the server. It is used/rendered at the root of the element hiearchy.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
They are generally the cleanest or best looking URLs and Create React App (which we are using in projects) supports the functionality by default.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
<Route /> is a child of <Switch /> to can the current URL and render a route while ignoring others that do not match.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
It checks to see if the Route path matches the beginning of the current URL.
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
The <Switch /> checks the condition of the URL vs the children Route paths in order to decide what Route to render.
- How does it decide what to render?
It decides by matching the beginning of the URL path to the Route path
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It is similar to an anchor (<a/>) tag in that it will render a new page/link to the HTML document.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It is a specific type of <Link /> that renders/styles itself when the to prop matches a current location
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
Anytime you want to force new navigation, you can render it to navigate the user to the path of it's to prop.