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?
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 (pushState, replaceState and the popstate event) to keep your UI in sync with the URL.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
BrowserRouter is used for doing client side routing with URL segments. You can load a top level component for each route. This helps separate concerns in your app and makes the logic/data flow more clear. We use the BrowserRouter because we want the GET request to be sent to the server. In order to render the router on the server, we need a location — we need the route. This route will be used on the server to tell the router what to render. The BrowserRouter is used when you want to render routes isomorphically.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
Its most basic responsibility is to render some UI when its path matches the current URL.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
render: func (this is a guess)
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
Renders the first child or that matches the location.
- How does it decide what to render?
It renders the first one.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
Provides declarative, accessible navigation around your application.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
A special version of the that will add styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
Rendering a will navigate to a new location. The new location will override the current location in the history stack.