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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?

  • We have to install React Router DOM using npm install 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 that uses the HTML5 history API to keep the UI up to date with the URL
  1. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps?
  • We would use <BrowserRouter /> to make it easier to keep our state up to date with our data. In doing so, we use an existing API to improve upon our code.

Route Matchers

  1. What does the <Route /> component do?
  • The <Route /> component is one of the most fundamental components in React Router. It replaces our conditional rendering & renders some UI when its path matches the current URL.
  1. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something?
  • The <Route /> component looks for when the URL matches it's own, developer specified path
  1. What does the <Switch /> component do?
  • A switch component allows us to pick & choose which components we want to render.
  1. How does it decide what to render?
  • You can utilize keywords like exact path and path to be more specific about what content is rendered.

Route Changers

  1. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it?
  • Provides a bit more specificity to help navigate around the application. The user can click on things to use the links.
  1. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it?
  • A special version of the <Link /> that adds styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL.
  1. What does the <Redirect /> component do?
  • A <Redirect /> allows us to navigate to new locations in our app, overriding the current location in the history stack
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