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?
install create-react-app npm install --save 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 />?
A that uses the HTML5 history API
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
So that we can use browser history when using our webpage and keep the UI in sync with the url.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
Renders some UI when its path matches the current URL
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
If the current url matches it's given path it will render something. It will display all things that match their route.
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
Switch targets the 1st route and only displays it. Nothing else inside the switch tag will display if path and url don't match. A user has to navigate to that url for that component or page to display.
- How does it decide what to render?
Based on each individual path rather than just the first one.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
Provides declarative, accessible navigation around your application, they click on it
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
<Link /> but you can style it, same interaction as <link />
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
Navigates the user to a new url. Useful when attached to boolean statments. New location overrides current location in history stack.