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? 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 uses regular URL paths. These are generally the best-looking URLs, but they require your server to be configured correctly

4. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps? Create React App supports this out of the box in development

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do? Renders a specific component based on the matching URL path

6. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something? By checking the current URL's path

7. What does the <Switch /> component do? It searches through its children elements to find one whose path matches the current URL

8. How does it decide what to render? By checking through each until it finds a path that matches the current URL

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it? It creates a link (or anchor tag) in our application. Then, a user can click the link and be redirected to another URL (another page view)
10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it? The is a special type of that can style itself as “active” when its to prop matches the current location. A user would again be able to click the link when it's active (when the 'to' property matches the URL)
11. What does the <Redirect /> component do? When a renders, it will navigate using its to prop. Forced navigation.