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 component that contains all additional routes and maintains the content in relation to the current URL. It also manages the URL history, thus enabling back/forward button navigation.
- What does the
<Route />component do?
- Takes a route (ie '/' or 'user/:id' and displays a component or nested components for that route)
- What does the
<Routes />component do?
- Routes is the parent component of route, and 'selects' a child route to render depending on the url.
- What does the
<Outlet />component do?
- Outlet lives within a component attached to a parent route and will render a specified child route component or an index compoent if one exists and the URL matches the parent route.
- What does the
<Link />component do? How does a user interact with it? It behaves like a normal link, changing the URL and therefore triggering a re-route - What does the
<NavLink />component do? How does a user interact with it? Navlink is pretty much the same as link, but it also maintains state and recognizes when it is active (so you can manipulate and style it accordingly)