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?
The React Router is installed from the public npm registry with either npm or yarn, after create-react-app is installed. react-router-dom is suggested for a web app
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 />?
It is a system that uses the HTML5 API history to update the browser
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
The BrowseRouter will keep our user interface current
- What does the
<Route />component do?
it renders data to keep the user interface current on the specified file path
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
The route is always rendering. if the filepath changes, it will render the chid component of the filepath
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
The switch component renders more specific elements
- How does it decide what to render?
The switch component renders only the first route that matches the path, so only the specified content will render, without any sidebars or extentions
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
The link component is interacted with by user events such as button clicks, which invoke history.push, which adds a record of the event to the history stack
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
The NavLink adds syling attributes when the element matching the url is rendered. Since it is a version of Link, it seems like the user would interact with it through some user event, such as a click event.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
The Redirect component navigates to a new location, overriding the current location in the history stack