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
You will not be turning this in; it's for your own understanding/learning/benefit 😁
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?
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 an HTML5 history API that keeps the pages UI synced with its URL.
- Why would we use
<BrowserRouter />in our apps?
This allows the user to have back-button functionality even when the URL remains the same.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
The Route component renders some UI when its path matches the current URL.
- How does the
<Route />component check whether it should render something?
It checks the URL for a match and then renders its child(ren) componenet(s) if there is a match.
- What does the
<Switch />component do?
This component renders a route exclusively, whereas every Route component that matches the location renders inclusively.
- How does it decide what to render?
It looks for the first match like the Route component, but renders only the first match.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
It provides declarative, accessible navigation around the application.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
A special version of the Link component that adds styling attributes to the rendered elemen when it matches the current URL.
- What does the
<Redirect />component do?
This component will navigate to a new location when rendering. The new location will overried the current location in the history stack.