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:
-
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 from react-router-dom. Use command:
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 />?
- A router component that stores URLs and communicates with web server
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
- In general: Router allows us to mimic navigation of multi-page app in our React single page app. Allows us to navigate to a page and back.
- Versus : The URLs look nice. URLs and corresponding pages are configured the same to the web server on both client-side and production-side.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
- It stores the path to child elements of
<Switch>
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
- If the path matches the current URL, then this component renders
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
- Searches through
<Route />elements to find one whose path matches the current URL, then renders the match.
- How does it decide what to render?
- If the path matches the beginning of the URL (current), that element is rendered
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- It creates links in your application via anchor
<a>tags - User interacts with it by clicking the link to view a new "page"
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- A special type of
<Link />that allows "active" class styling when it'stoprop matches the current URL
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
- Forces navigation to specified page using the
toprop