Routing in React

In a single-page app like this, a routing library in the UI interprets the URL path and renders an appropriate page for that path.

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React Router

The routing library you’ll be using in the app is React Router. It provides a way to create routes and navigate between them. For example, the app’s home URL at / will render a list of posts, while /post/0x123 will render the React component for the post with id 0x123.

Add dependencies to the project using the following commands:

yarn add react-router-dom
yarn add -D @types/react-router-dom

The -D option adds the TypeScript types @types/react-router-dom to the project as a development dependency. Types are part of the development environment of the project to help you build the app; but, in the build these types are compiled away.

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Add components

You’ll need components for the app to route to the various URLs. Create a src/components directory, and then components for the home page (components/home.tsx) and posts (components/post.tsx), with the following file content:

// components/home.tsx
import React from "react"

export function Home() {
  return <div>Home</div>
}

// components/post.tsx
import React from "react"

export function Post() {
  return <div>Post</div>
}

You can leave those as boilerplate for now and fill them in when you add GraphQL queries in the next step of this tutorial.

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Add routing

With the boilerplate components in place, you are now ready to add the routing logic to your app. Edit App.tsx to add routes for the home and post views, as shown below.

Note that the base URL points to the home component and /post/:id to the post component. In the post component, id is used to get the data for the right post:

...
import { Home } from "./components/home";
import { Post } from "./components/post";
import { BrowserRouter, Switch, Route } from "react-router-dom";

export function App() {
  return (
    <>
      <div className="app-banner">
        ...
      <div className="App">
        <div className="mt-4 mx-8">
          <p>
            Learn about building GraphQL apps with Dgraph Cloud at https://dgraph.io/learn
          </p>
          <BrowserRouter>
            <Switch>
              <Route exact path="/post/:id" component={Post} />
              <Route exact path="/" component={Home} />
            </Switch>
          </BrowserRouter>
        </div>
      </div>
    </>
  );
}

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This Step in GitHub

This step is also available in the tutorial GitHub repo with the routing-in-react tag and is this code diff.

You can run the app using the yarn start command, and then you can navigate to http://localhost:3000 and http://localhost:3000/post/0x123 to see the various pages rendered.

Next, let’s wire up the queries.