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 />?

• It is a provided router component that iuses HTML5 history API to keep the UI in sync with the URL

4. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps?

• To provide the functionality of a multi-page app with one base URL that has additional unique page URL's

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do?

• It can use a switch to condition which component we display per unique URL.

7. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something?

• it checks the location and compares it to the path specified in the Route component's props, rendering only the first matching one.

7. What does the <Switch /> component do?

• It is a conditional that chooses the first component to render that matches the criteria.

9. How does it decide what to render?

• Switch 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?

• It makes the call on what elements will point to which route. It is accessible to the user through mouse clicks or 'ENTER'

11. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it?

• It is a special route changer that is often used for styling as 'active' when it's 'to' prop matches

11. What does the <Redirect /> component do?

• This will behave much like a server-side redirect and override the current location in the history stack.