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?
- npm install react-router-dom
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 router
- It stores URL and communicates with web server
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
- I think it is a way to handle the various 'pages' of an application, so that a user can use the back button. I think ...
- What does the
<Route />component do?
- I believe it holds the URLs for the various pages.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
- When is rendered, it searches for the first child that matches the URL and renders only that one.
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
- I think that is what initiates searching the s for the matching URL.
- How does it decide what to render?
- It matches the beginning of the URL, and it was noted that it is important to list more specific URLs BEFORE less specific ones.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- Allows us to create links in our applications
- I'm not sure yet how to answer the second part of this question. I think the user can click the link?
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- I'm not feeling confident about what this does. The docs says that it styles the link as active, so it is a styling thing, I think?
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
- It forces navigation to whatever we put in the
to=" "prop for the<Redirect />