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 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's essentially an element object imported from the library that wraps your app and lets you specify page routes, or addresses at the end of the URL, for different components to display.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
It lets you use specific URLs for different areas and makes it easier to change the display of one component/fetch.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
It lets you establish a specific path the the component it renders.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
It checks the URL address for the specified path.
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
It denotes that there are different optional routes that can be switched between depending on the URL.
- How does it decide what to render?
It checks the URL address.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It links a component like a button or other event-listener, but to a specifc route.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It links a nav element to a route page, the user clicks on that like a normal but it changes the URL.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
It redirects to a page overwriting the current location in the history stack.