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

You will not be turning this in; it's for your own understanding/learning/benefit 😁

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?

• npm install 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 router in React that keeps your UI in sync with the URL, allows URL to be changed. It is the parent component used to store all other components.

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

• Adds ability to add routing to React in imports. ex: import { BrowserRouter as Router, Switch, Route} from "react-router-dom"; Everything wrapped in Router component in App return has ability to do Routing now. More readable than conditional erndering, no need for unnecessary data in state such as isGridMode: true Users can easily share specific onctent from within the app uses URL to keep track of where user is on page.

Route Matchers

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

• renders a component based on the URL (now er can use the back button!)

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

• The Route component uses a path or an "exact path" to render out to the correct component. Be sure to add a component attribute so the path knows where to render to ex: <Route path="/about" component={About} />

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

*Stops the whole process of having to go through all of the Route components because of a path="/" . Instead, it goes to one that matches, and renders only that component and stops. Parent to all Routes.

8. How does it decide what to render?

*It matches the first match and only renders that component. Be sure to have path="/" exact on the Home or Main component

Route Changers

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

• In Nav, import { Link } from "react-router-dom" then, a user can click between pages and the browser's ending URL will change.

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

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

12. Readers/Accessors: (These components READ the URL and then render hte right stuff based on the URL *Route (looks at URL and then renders the right components) *Switch (more complex than reoute, it's like an if/else statement and bug catchall to send home)

13. Changers: *Link (when triggered, the URL will change, and re-render on any updates, takes you to new page) *NavLink (fancy Link with some css involved, it has built in functionality to style "active" tabs ising .active class . If you want to see buttons at all still, use navLink (like Turing nav bar underlined blue)) *ReDirect (forced by developer, ex:Turing.io taked you to Turing.edu)