2001 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? 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.

3. What is a <BrowserRouter />? A Router that uses the HTML5 history API (pushState, replaceState and the popstate event) to keep your UI in sync with the URL.

4. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps? In order to mimic the organization of a multi page website. Gives unique pages unique urls instead of reloading them all at the same base url.

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do? The route component allows us to distinguish what should be displayed at each url. This can take the place of conditional rendering in most cases

6. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something? By looking at the url and rendering only what matches that route components designated display components.

7. What does the <Switch /> component do? Switch allows the control of exactly which components to render. This allows us to only load the page we want, while route allows us to designate a path to a set of components (which can probably have an even more unique id).

8. How does it decide what to render? Looks for the matching Route component at the current url.

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it? Decides exactly what elements lead to what route. Users can interact with it by causing an event on the component (usually a click or an enter)

10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it? Users interact the same was as <Link />, but this navlink allows us control of styling components rendered

11. 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, like server-side redirects (HTTP 3xx) do.