/react-router-nested-routes-code-along

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Nested Routes in React Router

Objectives

  • Describe how to render JSX within a Route
  • Describe how React Router allows nesting routes and URL parameters
  • Explain how to organize routes in a standard React & React Router application

Overview

In the previous lesson, we saw how to have routes dynamically render different components. However, as you may have noticed, each time we rendered one component, our previous component disappeared.

In this code-along, we'll look at how Routes can be written inside components that are themselves children of other Routes.

Master/Detail Pattern Without Routes

Have you ever used Apple's Messages app for your Mac? What about YouTube? These apps use some version of a "Master-Detail" interface: there is some piece of the interface that provides access to the entire resource which we can use to select specific items from. The resource might be a list of all messages, videos, or emails. Clicking on one will trigger a more detailed display of that specific item or action on another portion of the screen instead of displaying an entirely new page. With this design, a user can navigate through many items in a list, looking at item details without ever leaving the page they are on.

Consider how we might create this sort of design in regular React, without using Routes: we could create two sibling components, one for the 'master' list, and the other for the details of a specific item. We could call them List and Item. Then, we create one parent component for both that handles state. The parent component could keep track of all the list data and which particular item is currently selected, and pass down props to both components. This would work, but there are limitations. One problem with this setup is that changing state won't change the URL, meaning there is no way to provide a link directly to one particular item from our list of resources.

Apps like YouTube display a list of videos, and clicking on any one video will load it, but every time you open a particular video, the URL changes. YouTube assigns unique values to each video (something like dQw4w9WgXcQ). When viewing that video, the value is listed as part of the URL. This value is a URL parameter and allows for convenient sharing and bookmarking.

We've seen already that we can use React-Router to alter the URL of a React app. The challenge here though - how do we set up our Routes so that they can produce URLs with parameters that correspond to resources we want to display in our app?

Nesting

So far, we've only seen Routes side by side, but that won't really work in this example. When a list item is clicked, we want to see the details of that item, but we still want the list to display.

Instead of listing two Routes side by side, with React-Router, we can make the master-detail pattern by making our Item component the child of the List component.

Think of YouTube again for a moment. Let's pretend that visiting /videos displays a list of videos. Clicking on any video should keep our list of videos on the page, but also display details on the selected video. This should be updated in the URL - the URL should change to /videos/:videoId, where :videoId is a unique value (this is slightly different than how YouTube works but the concepts are similar). Using nested React-Router, we can write our application so one component, the List (of videos) renders using a Route that matches the path /videos. Then, within List, we add a second Route that renders Item when the path matches /videos/:videoId.

Let's build this out!

Rendering Our List

To begin, let's take a look at our starter code. First, we have our App component. App has some dummy movie data provided in state for us (normally, we would likely be fetching this info).

 state = {
    movies: {
      1: { id: 1, title: 'A River Runs Through It' },
      2: { id: 2, title: 'Se7en' },
      3: { id: 3, title: 'Inception' }
    }
  }

App also has Router wrapping everything inside the JSX code. All JSX wrapped within Router can use Routes, including the JSX from any child components. In our case, that is all of our components.

App has two Route elements:

<Route exact path="/" render={() => <div>Home</div>} />
<Route path='/movies' render={routerProps => <MoviesPage {...routerProps} movies={this.state.movies}/>} />

Aside: Notice that instead of the component prop, we're using render. The render prop works very similarly to component, but instead of passing an entire component in, we must pass a function that returns JSX. As we see in the example above, this means we can write JSX code directly, having the function return <div>Home</div>. Or, we can have the function return a component, like the second Route above.

Notice what is happening on the second Route. When rendering a component through a Route with the render prop, the function accepts an argument, routerProps. When the path matches the URL, the Route will call the function inside render and pass in the current information available about the route, including the URL path that caused the Route to render. This is not possible with the regular component prop on Routes we've seen before.

So, if the URL path matches /movies, the function inside render is called. The object that is passed in, routerProps, gets passed to the MoviesPage component as props. Using the spread operator ({...routerProps}) will result in the creation of props for each key present inside the routerProps object. This isn't vital but is a helpful way to pass many props in without too much code clutter.

So, the component, MoviesPage, receives props from the Route that contain information on the route. In addition, we can also pass in other props, as we see with movies={this.state.movies}.

Looking at the MoviesPage component, this component is responsible for loading our MoviesList component and passing in the movies we received from App.

// ./src/containers/MoviesPage.js
import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
import MoviesList from '../components/MoviesList';

const MoviesPage = ({ movies }) => (
  <div>
    <MoviesList movies={movies} />
  </div>
)

export default MoviesPage

At the moment, our MoviesPage component is purely presentational. It is simply the middle component between App and MoviesList, but we will come back to this component in a moment. Right now, if we try to run our React app, we get an error because MoviesList is not defined yet!

Let's create our MoviesList component to render React Router Links for each movie:

// ./src/components/MoviesList.js
import React from 'react';
import { Link } from 'react-router-dom';

const MoviesList = ({ movies }) => {
  const renderMovies = Object.keys(movies).map(movieID =>
    <Link key={movieID} to={`/movies/${movieID}`}>{movies[movieID].title}</Link>
  );

  return (
    <div>
      {renderMovies}
    </div>
  );
};

export default MoviesList;

The movies prop has been passed from App to MoviesPage, then again to MoviesList. To make the code a little simpler, we've used object destructuring to get to movies directly, rather than have to write props.movies in multiple places.

The movies prop is an object containing each movie. To iterate over this object, we'll use Object.keys(movies) to get an array of keys, then map over this array. Since the keys in the object are also the id values for each movie, the elements in .map() are referred to as movieID. We can use movieID directly in some of the attributes like key, but also use it to get information from the movies object, as we see with movies[movieID].title.

In the Link, we've also used interpolation to create a dynamic path in to:

to={`/movies/${movieID}`}

Now, if we start up the app, we'll see that if a user goes to the /movies route, MoviesList will render a list of clickable router links. Clicking on one of the movie names will cause the URL to display that movie's id.

Linking to the Show

Right now, we're using React Router to display the MoviesPage component when the URL is /movies.

Next, we'll add in our first nested route within MoviesPage so that going to '/movies/:movieId' will display details about a given movie using a MovieShow component.

Before that, let's create our MovieShow component. Later on, we will see that this component will need to dynamically figure out which Movie it should render.

// ./src/components/MovieShow.js
import React from 'react';

const MovieShow = props => {

  return (
    <div>
      <h3>Movies Show Component!</h3>
    </div>
  );
}

export default MovieShow;

Next, we import MovieShow into MoviesPage and add a nested route in our src/containers/MoviesPage.js file to display the MovieShow container if that route matches /movies/:movieId.

// .src/containers/MoviesPage.js
import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
import MoviesList from '../components/MoviesList';
// import the `MovieShow` component:
import MovieShow from '../components/MovieShow';

// Here we add `match` to the arguments so we can access the path information 
// in `routerProps` that is passed from App.js 
const MoviesPage = ({ match, movies }) => (
  <div>
    <MoviesList movies={movies} />
    // We also add a `Route` component that will render `MovieShow`
    // when a movie is selected
    <Route path={`${match.url}/:movieId`} component={MovieShow}/>
  </div>
)

export default MoviesPage

Above, we've imported MovieShow and added a Route component. You will notice that we are now inheriting match from this.props. This comes from the routerProps passed in from App. This is a POJO (plain old Javascript object) that contains the current URL. Using match, we can show stuff depending on what the match.url returns. We do this because we want the Route inside MoviesPage to match the exact URL that caused MoviesPage to render, plus :movieId. :movieId represents a parameter. If we visit http://localhost:3000/movies/1, the movieId parameter would be "1".

Going briefly back to our MoviesList component, remember that when movies is mapped, our Links are each getting a unique path in the to={...} attribute, since each movieID is different.

// ./src/components/MoviesList.js
import React from 'react';
import { Link } from 'react-router-dom';

const MoviesList = ({ movies }) => {
  const renderMovies = Object.keys(movies).map(movieID =>
    <Link key={movieID} to={`/movies/${movieID}`}>{movies[movieID].title}</Link>
  );

  return (
    <div>
      {renderMovies}
    </div>
  );
};

export default MoviesList;

Refresh the page at /movies. Now, clicking a link changes the route, but we're not actually seeing any content about that movie on our MovieShow page. You should only see the text Movies Show Component! under the navigation and movie links.

Just as we saw with App, the data we want to display on a particular MovieShow page is available in its parent, MoviesPage, as props. For MovieShow to display this content, we will need to make our movies collection available within MovieShow.

// .src/containers/MoviesPage.js
import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
import MoviesList from '../components/MoviesList';
import MovieShow from '../components/MovieShow';

const MoviesPage = ({ match, movies }) => (
  <div>
    <MoviesList movies={movies} />
    // Adding code to pass the movies to the `MovieShow` component
    <Route path={`${match.url}/:movieId`} component={<MovieShow movies={movies} /> }/>
  </div>
)

export default MoviesPage

This isn't enough though - MovieShow now has all the movies, but it doesn't know which movie it should display. This information is only available from the URL. Remember — when we click a Link to a movie, it adds that movie's id to the URL as a parameter. We need to get that parameter out of the URL and into MovieShow. Any guess as to how we might do that?

...

If you recall from the earlier Routes in App, by using a Route's render prop, we can pass in a function that has access to information about the route itself. We can rewrite the Route in MoviesPage to do this:

// .src/containers/MoviesPage.js
import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
import MoviesList from '../components/MoviesList';
import MovieShow from '../components/MovieShow';

const MoviesPage = ({ match, movies }) => (
  <div>
    <MoviesList movies={movies} />
    // Here we replace the `component` prop with the `render` prop so we can pass the 
    // route information to the `MovieShow` component
    <Route path={`${match.url}/:movieId`} render={routerProps => <MovieShow {...routerProps} movies={movies} /> }/>
  </div>
)

export default MoviesPage

Now, all the key/value pairs within routerProps are also passed into MovieShow as props. Just like before, one of the props we receive from the Route is match, and match contains all the parameters from the URL! These parameters are stored as key/value pairs in match.params. The key corresponds to whatever we named the parameter in our Route, so in this case, the parameter will be movieId. We can update MovieShow to utilize this parameter in conjunction with the movies data that was passed down:

// .src/components/MovieShow.js
import React from 'react';

// Here we add `match` to the arguments so we can access the path information 
// in `routerProps` that is passed from MoviesPage.js 
const MovieShow = ({match, movies}) => {
  return (
    <div>
      // And here we access the `movieId` stored in match.params to render 
      // information about the selected movie
      <h3>{ movies[match.params.movieId].title }</h3>
    </div>
  );
}

export default MovieShow;

Here, we've got our movies as an object in props. We've also got our Router props - from which we've extracted match. Within the match object is params. In this case, we only have the one parameter, movieId, which we defined in MoviesPage. Combining info from these two props lets us access the specific movie whose key matches the movieId from the URL path, resulting in the correct movie title being displayed!

We've succeeded in creating a "Master-Detail" interface - the list of movies is always present when viewing a particular movie's details. Clicking through the links changes the URL. With this setup, users of this site could bookmark or share the URL for a specific movie!

What Happens If We Only Visit the First Route?

With our main task completed, let's take a quick step back and ask a question - what happens in this app when we visit http://localhost:3000/movies without a particular movieId parameter? Well, MoviesPage renders due to the top-level /movies Route, but MoviesPage will only render MoviesList. There is no default Route, so we don't see anything. If we want to create a default Route here, we can do so using the match prop once again:

// .src/containers/MoviesPage.js
import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
import MoviesList from '../components/MoviesList';
import MovieShow from '../components/MovieShow';

const MoviesPage = ({ match, movies }) => (
  <div>
    <MoviesList movies={movies} />
    // Adding code to show a message to the user to select a movie if they haven't yet
    <Route exact path={match.url} render={() => <h3>Choose a movie from the list above</h3>}/>
    <Route path={`${match.url}/:movieId`} render={routerProps => <MovieShow {...routerProps} movies={movies} /> }/>
  </div>
)

export default MoviesPage

Now, when we visit http://localhost:3000/movies, we see a message that only appears if there is no additional movieId at the end of the URL. This is the nested version of a default route. We can't just write exact path="/" since these Routes will only render inside the /movies Route.

Summary

To briefly review - we are able to nest Routes within each other. Using the Router props we receive from the top-level Route, we can nest a second Route that extends the URL path of the first. We can actually nest Routes as many times as we would like, so if we wanted, we could go fully RESTful and create nested Routes inside MovieShow as well, allowing us to write URL paths that would look something like this:

http://localhost:3000/movies/:movieId/edit

To get nested Routes to work, we need to utilize route information that is stored in the match props. match contains both the current URL path in match.url, as well as any parameters in match.params. We define the parameter names in a Route's path by prepending a colon (:) to the front of the name. This name will then show up as a key inside match.params.

We can use parameters to look up specific data - in this case matching the key of a movies object with the URL parameter, :movieId, allowed us to display a particular movie's title.

Nesting routes enables us to build single-page applications in React that behave like they have many pages. We can also load up and display specific data dynamically.

In the early days of the internet, we would have had to create separate HTML pages for each movie in this application. Now, with React, we can write abstract components that fill in the data for each 'page' on demand. Very cool!

View React Router Nested Routes on Learn.co and start learning to code for free.