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 />?
- Seems like it's a wrapper that connects the app to the web browser's URL bar (and the history stack, I think?).
- What does the
<Route />component do?
- Connects a component to a URL path.
- What does the
<Routes />component do?
- Seems to wrap around all possible Routes.
- What does the
<Outlet />component do?
- It allows the URL to be anchored by the parent element so that only the child elements of the URL get switched around?
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it?
- What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it?