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 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?
   BrowserRouter uses regular url paths, which provides the most traditional and user-friendly user experience in a browser. This is what is used for most modern apps.

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do?
   Each Route component is associated with a particular url/path of the app, and houses the UI associated with that app url.

6. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something?
   It checks if the current url matches the url specified in its path attribute.

7. What does the <Switch /> component do?
   The Switch component contains multiple Route components associated with different urls of the app, each containing different UI to render.

8. How does it decide what to render?
   It searches through its child Route elements to find the first one which has a path attribute that matches the current URL.

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it?
   The Link component lets you create links in your app. It renders an anchor tag in your HTML document, so users will be able to click on that tag to be routed to the path its associated with.

10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it?
    The NavLink component is a special type of Link component that can be styled as "active" when its link matches the current url, thus indicating to the user that that is their current page.

11. What does the <Redirect /> component do?
    The Redirect component can render a redirect, rendering a different page on the app specified in its "to" attribute.