This gist contains a short assignment we'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:
Read through this guide.
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 UI in sync with the URL.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
<Route />renders some UI when its path matches the current URL.
- What does the
<Routes />component do?
- Allows you to have multiple
<Route />components that share a base URL and pick the most specific or first element to match.
- What does the
<Outlet />component do?
<Oulet />sswaps out the child that matches but the parent layout persists. It will always render the next match.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
<Link />provides declarative, accessible navigation around your application.
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- A special version of the
<Link>component that will add styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL.