/lab-wiki-countries

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LAB | React WikiCountries

Introduction

After spending too much time on GitHub, you found a JSON dataset of countries and you decided to use it to create your Wikipedia of countries!

Example - Finished LAB

Setup

  • Fork this repo

  • Clone this repo

  • Open the LAB and start:

    $ cd lab-wiki-countries
$ npm install
$ npm start

Submission

  • Upon completion, run the following commands:

    git add .
git commit -m "done"
git push origin master

  • Create a Pull Request so that your TAs can check your work.

Getting Started

Clean the App.js component so that it has the following structure:

// src/App.js
import "./App.css";

function App() {
  return <div className="App"></div>;
}
export default App;

Instructions

Iteration 0 | React Router installation

Remember to install the React Router:

$ npm install react-router-dom

And setup the router in your src/index.js file:

// src/index.js

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import './index.css';
import App from './App';
import reportWebVitals from './reportWebVitals';

import { BrowserRouter as Router } from 'react-router-dom';

ReactDOM.render(
  <Router>
    <App />
  </Router>,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

// comment skipped to stay organized
reportWebVitals();

Bootstrap installation

We will use Bootstrap V4 for the design 👍

$ npm install bootstrap

To make the Bootstrap styles available in the entire app, import the stylesheet in index.js:

// src/index.js
import 'bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css';

Instructions

Iteration 1.1 | Create components

In this iteration, we will focus on the general layout. Before you start, inside the src folder, create the components folder. There you will create at least 3 components:

  • Navbar: Displaying the basic navbar with the LAB name

  • CountriesList: Displays the list of links with the country names. Each link should be a react-router-dom Link which we will use to send the country code (alpha3Code) via the URL.

  • CountryDetails: Is the component that we will render via the react-router-dom's Route and will be receiving the country code (alpha3Code) via the URL.

    This is actually the id of the country (example: /ESP for Spain, /FRA for France).

To help you with the structure of the components, we gave you an example of a page inside example.html.

If you want to style it, refresh your memory on Bootstrap in the docs or check out how we approached styling in the example.html.

Iteration 1.2 | Navbar component

The simplest way to define a component in React is to write a JavaScript function aka function component. The navbar should be displaying the title of the LAB - WikiCountries.

Iteration 1.3 | CountriesList component

This component should render a list of Links that are used to trigger the browser URL change. Click on a Link component will then activate the corresponding Route showing the country details component.

Iteration 1.4 | CountryDetails component and Route setup

Now that our list of countries is ready, we should create the CountryDetails component. CountryDetails displays the country details as per the link that we clicked. This component should be dynamically displayed/rendered with the <Route /> using the render prop:

// Example
<Route render={(props) => <SomeComponent {...props} otherProp={someData} > } />

You should create only 1 <Route /> for the CountryDetails component.

Components rendered by the Route receive special props (match, location and history) passed by the react-router-dom. We can use this props to obtain the information coming from the browser's URL bar, for example, the alpha3Code code of the country. For a reminder on how to set up and access the URL parameters with React Router check this example.

NOTE: For the small picture of the flag, you can use the alpha2Code and embed it in the URL as shown below:

Iteration 2 | Linking it all together

Once done creating the components, the structure of elements that your App.js will render should look somewhat like this:

<div className="App">
  <Navbar />

  <div className="container">
    <div className="row">
      <CountriesList countries={countries} />
      {/* React-Router Switch & the Route rendering the CountryDetails should go here */}
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Iteration 3 | Set the state when the component mounts

Our App.js application should have its own state with a state variable countries holding the data coming from the countries.json file.

The state should be set only once, after the component is initially rendered to the DOM using the useEffect() Hook.

Iteration 4 | Bonus | Fetch countries data from an API

Instead of relying on the static data coming from a json file, let's do something more interesting and get out the data from an actual API.

Let's make a GET request to the URL https://restcountries.eu/rest/v2/name/all and use the data returned from the response as the list of the countries. You can use either fetch or axios to make the request. You should use the useEffect() Hook to set an effect that runs only once and makes a request to the API.

The request should happen first thing when the application loads, therefore think about when and from where we should make the request to the API.

Note: The sturcture of the objects/documents returned by the RestCountries API may be different than the one you have in the countries.json file. This means that you may need to update your components to correctly access the values from the objects.

Iteration 5 | Bonus | Fetch one country data from an API

Using the useEffect Hook set an effect in the CountriesDetails component. The effect should make a request to the RestCountries API and fetch the data for the specific country. You can construct the request endpoint using the country's alpha3Code. Example:

The effect should run after the initial render and each time the URL parameter with the alpha3Code changes.

Happy coding! ❤️