We basically wrote the tutorial the way that we wanted the code to work and then we made the tutorial work by writing the code. As opposed to README-Driven Development, this is Tutorial-Driven Development.
Tom Preston-Werner - Full Stack Radio
Part 2 - Routes, Layouts
In part 1 we installed and created our first RedwoodJS application with the Redwood CLI. We used:
-
yarn create redwood-app
to generate the initial app -
redwood generate page
-
HomePage
folder containing aHomePage
file containing aHomePage
component -
AboutPage
folder containing anAboutPage
file containing anAboutPage
component
-
We were able to navigate between the different pages in our browser by entering /about
for the About page or a slash (/
) for the Home page. Depending on your experience with React this may have been surprising to you.
If you've worked on routing in React before you know that to achieve this there needs to be an entirely different package imported containing the router and then your routes need to be wrapped in a <BrowserRouter>
or <Router>
component to give the router access to your pages. Well guess what.....
2.1 Routes.js
// web/src/Routes.js
import { Router, Route } from '@redwoodjs/router'
const Routes = () => {
return (
<Router>
<Route path="/about" page={AboutPage} name="about" />
<Route path="/" page={HomePage} name="home" />
<Route notfound page={NotFoundPage} />
</Router>
)
}
export default Routes
In our web/src
folder we have a file called Routes.js
. When we used the CLI to generate HomePage
and AboutPage
we also created these routes.
Components from web/src/pages
are auto-imported. Nested directories are supported, and should be uppercase. Each sub-directory will be prepended onto the component name. For example:
web/src/pages/HomePage/HomePage.js
-> HomePage
web/src/pages/Admin/YoPage/YoPage.js
-> AdminYoPage
2.2 App.js
The other file in our web/src
folder is index.js
which is our root component that ReactDOM
renders to the screen.
All components are composable in React. This encourages the creation of reusable UI components that present data that changes over time. Web application UIs were traditionally built using templates or HTML directives.
But in React you always have a root component that contains other components and those components can contain other components.
// web/src/App.js
import { FatalErrorBoundary, RedwoodProvider } from '@redwoodjs/web'
import { RedwoodApolloProvider } from '@redwoodjs/web/apollo'
import FatalErrorPage from 'src/pages/FatalErrorPage'
import Routes from 'src/Routes'
import './index.css'
const App = () => (
<FatalErrorBoundary page={FatalErrorPage}>
<RedwoodProvider titleTemplate="%PageTitle | %AppTitle">
<RedwoodApolloProvider>
<Routes />
</RedwoodApolloProvider>
</RedwoodProvider>
</FatalErrorBoundary>
)
export default App
If that's confusing just give it some time and it'll start to click as this series goes on. The important take away is that we have three nested layers:
RedwoodApolloProvider
Redwood Apps come ready-to-query with RedwoodApolloProvider
, which is a Provider that wraps ApolloProvider. But with a bit of configuring, you can swap out RedwoodApolloProvider for your client of choice.
For an example of configuring your own GraphQL Client, see the redwoodjs-react-query-provider. You can also install react-query directly into your project and fire away with the fetch()
API.
Why would someone do this? If you don't import RedwoodApolloProvider
it won't be included in your bundle size. This will reduce one of your heaviest client dependencies. There are also a variety of different default caching strategies across different clients.
2.3 Link
Matching URLs to Pages is the first half of the equation when it comes to routing. The other half is generating links to your pages. We want to add a link to the page for navigating between our home
and about
pages. We'll need three things in our HomePage.js
:
- Import
Link
androutes
from@redwoodjs/router
<Link to={}>About</Link>
- Pass
routes.about()
into<Link to={}>
// web/src/pages/HomePage/HomePage.js
import { Link, routes } from '@redwoodjs/router'
import { MetaTags } from '@redwoodjs/web'
const HomePage = () => {
return (
<>
<MetaTags
title="Home"
description="The home page of the website"
/>
<header>
<h1>ajcwebdev</h1>
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><Link to={routes.about()}>About</Link></li>
</ul>
</nav>
</header>
<main>This page is the home!</main>
<footer>
<h3>Find me online:</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://dev.to/ajcwebdev">Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/ajcwebdev">Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/ajcwebdev">GitHub</a></li>
</ul>
</footer>
</>
)
}
export default HomePage
Link
generates a link to a route. The routes
object can access URL generators for any of the routes. These are called named route functions because they are named after anything you include in the name
prop of the Route
.
Return to the browser to see the changes to your Home page.
Click the link to be brought to the About page.
Now we want to be able to navigate back to HomePage
once we are on AboutPage
. We'll do the exact same three steps except we pass in routes.home()
instead of routes.about()
because we want to navigate to HomePage
.
// web/src/pages/AboutPage/AboutPage.js
import { Link, routes } from '@redwoodjs/router'
import { MetaTags } from '@redwoodjs/web'
const AboutPage = () => {
return (
<>
<MetaTags
title="About"
description="The page that tells you about stuff"
/>
<header>
<h1>ajcwebdev</h1>
<nav>
<ul>
<li><Link to={routes.home()}>Home</Link></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><Link to={routes.about()}>About</Link></li>
</ul>
</nav>
</header>
<main>
<p>This page tells you about stuff!</p>
</main>
</>
)
}
export default AboutPage
Return to your About page
There is now a link that will take you back to the Home page when clicked.
2.4 redwood generate layout
You've probably been on a website before. Usually there's some kind of navigation bar at the top and footer at the bottom that stays consistent as you travel around the website. Redwood's folder structure is designed to make this really easy.
Remember how I said everything is a component containing other components? Pages contain components and your layout will contain all of your pages. This is natural to do in React because pages and layouts are themselves components.
We can generate a file for our layout with yarn redwood generate layout
or yarn rw g layout
. This will work a lot like the generate page
commands from earlier.
yarn rw g layout blog
✔ Generating layout files...
✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/layouts/BlogLayout/BlogLayout.test.js`
✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/layouts/BlogLayout/BlogLayout.stories.js`
✔ Successfully wrote file `./web/src/layouts/BlogLayout/BlogLayout.js`
This will create a folder inside web/src/layouts
instead of web/src/pages
because we are generating a layout and not a page.
└── layouts
└── BlogLayout
│── BlogLayout.js
│── BlogLayout.stories.js
└── BlogLayout.test.js
2.5 BlogLayout
// web/src/layouts/BlogLayout/BlogLayout.js
const BlogLayout = ({ children }) => {
return <>{children}</>
}
export default BlogLayout
children
is where the magic will happen. Any page content given to the layout will be rendered here.
// web/src/layouts/BlogLayout/BlogLayout.js
import { Link, routes } from '@redwoodjs/router'
const BlogLayout = ({ children }) => {
return (
<>
<header>
<h1>ajcwebdev</h1>
<nav>
<ul>
<li><Link to={routes.home()}>Home</Link></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><Link to={routes.about()}>About</Link></li>
</ul>
</nav>
</header>
<main>{children}</main>
<footer>
<h3>Find me online:</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://dev.to/ajcwebdev">Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/ajcwebdev">Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/ajcwebdev">GitHub</a></li>
</ul>
</footer>
</>
)
}
export default BlogLayout
Now we'll add a <BlogLayout>
wrapper around the content returned in our HomePage
and AboutPage
components.
// web/src/pages/HomePage/HomePage.js
import { MetaTags } from '@redwoodjs/web'
import BlogLayout from 'src/layouts/BlogLayout'
const HomePage = () => {
return (
<>
<BlogLayout>
<MetaTags
title="Home"
description="The home page of the website"
/>
<p>This page is the home!</p>
</BlogLayout>
</>
)
}
export default HomePage
We can remove the import
for Link
and routes
from HomePage
since those are now inside the BlogLayout
.
// web/src/pages/AboutPage/AboutPage.js
import { MetaTags } from '@redwoodjs/web'
import BlogLayout from 'src/layouts/BlogLayout'
const AboutPage = () => {
return (
<BlogLayout>
<MetaTags
title="About"
description="The page that tells you about stuff"
/>
<p>This page tells you about stuff!</p>
</BlogLayout>
)
}
export default AboutPage
The import statement uses src/layouts/BlogLayout
and not ../src/layouts/BlogLayout
or ./src/layouts/BlogLayout
. This is a convenience feature so you don't need to worry about the nesting of your folders.
src
is an alias to the src
path in the current workspace.
- When working in
web
,src
points toweb/src
- When working in
api
,src
points toapi/src
If we look at HomePage
it should look and behave the same way as before except we have turned our title in the <h1>
tag into a HomePage
link.
AboutPage
is the same except we have removed the link to return Home since we can now click the title.
In the next part we'll start working with a database and learn how to create, retrieve, update, and destroy blog posts.
Top comments (0)