2003 React Router Prework.md

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
3. Comment a link to your forked copy on the original gist

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 browser allows you to change the url of a page and in doing so route to a diffent page. ie main page, login page, etc

4. Why would we use <BrowserRouter /> in our apps? We would use it our apps to route to different pages

Route Matchers

5. What does the <Route /> component do? Thr router renders the page that matches the current route
6. How does the <Route /> component check whether it should render something? it uses the match or exact match keyword of the path matches it is rendered. The switch tag determines which route will actually be rendered.
7. What does the <Switch /> component do? The switch statement determines which route should run.
8. How does it decide what to render? It decides what to render by reading the file path and finding the matching route.

Route Changers

9. What does the <Link /> component do? How does a user interact with it? It changes the url when a page is clicked to the url that is provided in the tag so that the router can render the appropriate page. The user interacts with it by clicking a link.

10. What does the <NavLink /> component do? How does a user interact with it? A navlink is a special kind of link that has a active status (I am not sure exactly what that means) you can use inline stying to style the navlink. The user interacts with a navlink by clicking on it to change the url to the url of the desired page.

11. What does the <Redirect /> component do? Redirect is often used alongside state. You can give state a key of a url and when a button/link is clicked update the url of state to the url and then redirect the user to the appropriate page.