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:
-
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)
-
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 />?
- A Router that uses the HTML5 history API (pushState, replaceState and the popstate event) to keep your UI in sync with the URL.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
- By using BrowserRoute in our apps, we allow our single page apps mimic the behavior of multipage apps while keeping our UI in sync with the url. Using BrowserRoute helps us load a top level component for each route and helps separate concerns in your app while making the logic/data flow more clear.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
- The Route component, at it's core, allows us to render some UI when its path matches the current URL. The Route component expects a path prop (string) that describes the path name, and has three way in which it can render something (Route component, Route render and Route children)
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
- It checks within the Route to see if the path matches the current URL, if so it renders its children (our component).
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
- Switch renders the first child Route or Redirect that matches the location. This is different than doing a bunch of Routes because it renders a route exclusively whereas every Route that matches the location renders inclusively.
- How does it decide what to render?
- Switch will start looking for a matching Route. When a Route is matched Switch will stop looking for matches and render that first child Route and only that one.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- Provides declarative, accessible navigation around your application. I user interacts with a Link when a button or something is clicked that would then direct them to a different part of an app.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- A special version of the Link that will add styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL. When a user clicks on a link when using NavLink, the should see the URL change to the routes each NavLink is told to route to.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
- Rendering a Redirect will navigate to a new location. The new location will override the current location in the history stack.