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?

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.

3. What is a <BrowserRouter />? It is a component wrapper used around a react router project if you want to be able to create multiple pages and be able to navigate between them.

4. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps? Specifcally BrowserRouter uses regular url paths instead of hashes or something less legible and/or user friendly.

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do? This is an element that allows you to decide what you rant to be rendered at a specific url path.

6. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something? It checks to see if the beging of the path matches the route path, unless there is a specified eact path where the entire url has to match.

7. What does the <Switch /> component do? The switch componenet allows for an order of checks on the routes for a given path, seaking the first router that satifies the current url to be rendered, the order you place routers in a switch will determine which one renders at a given url if they don't have exact paths or some of the paths share characters.

8. How does it decide what to render? It works top down, finding the first route with a path that matches the begining of the url, so if a route with a path of "/here" is first and the url has a path of "/here/there" it will still choose that route even if later in the line there are closer matches. Similarly if a route with a path of "here/there" is ordered higher, the more specific route will be chosen.

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it? It creates a clickable component for the user, that sends the user to a certain url.

10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it? It also creates that clickable component for the user to navigate with, but it also more specifically styles itself as "active" if the user is already on the url for the designated path.

11. What does the <Redirect /> component do? This component forces the url to change and navigted the user to a specific url path without their direct interaction.