Introduction

When building a web application, it is essential to have shareable URLs that allow users to share specific pages or states with others. In this blog post, we will explore how to implement shareable URL routes using Redux and react-router.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, it is assumed that you have a basic understanding of React, Redux, and react-router. If you are unfamiliar with these technologies, I recommend checking out their respective documentations.

Setting up react-router

First, let’s set up react-router in our application. Start by installing the necessary packages:

npm install react-router-dom

Next, create a Router component to wrap your application’s routes. In your main index.js file, import the required dependencies and set up the router:

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { BrowserRouter as Router } from 'react-router-dom';
import App from './App';

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

Configuring Redux

To integrate Redux with react-router, we need to make a few changes to our Redux configuration.

1. Install the required packages:

npm install react-router-redux connected-react-router

1. Create a history object that will be used by both react-router and Redux:

import { createBrowserHistory } from 'history';

const history = createBrowserHistory();

1. Update your Redux store’s configuration to use the connected-react-router package:

import { createStore, combineReducers, applyMiddleware } from 'redux';
import { connectRouter, routerMiddleware } from 'connected-react-router';
import rootReducer from './reducers';

const store = createStore(
  combineReducers({
    router: connectRouter(history),
    ...rootReducer,
  }),
  applyMiddleware(routerMiddleware(history))
);

Using URL parameters with Redux actions

To make our application’s URL shareable, we can use URL parameters to store the state of our application. This way, when a user visits a specific URL, we can extract the parameters and use them to dispatch the relevant Redux action.

Let’s take an example of a blog application where we want to share a specific blog post with its ID as a URL parameter. In our App component, we can define a route to handle the blog post page:

import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
import BlogPost from './components/BlogPost';

const App = () => (
  <div>
    {/* other routes */}
    <Route path="/blog/:postId" component={BlogPost} />
  </div>
);

export default App;

In our BlogPost component, we can extract the postId parameter from the URL and dispatch a Redux action to fetch the blog post data:

import React, { useEffect } from 'react';
import { useParams } from 'react-router-dom';
import { useDispatch, useSelector } from 'react-redux';
import { fetchBlogPost } from '../actions';

const BlogPost = () => {
  const { postId } = useParams();
  const dispatch = useDispatch();
  const post = useSelector(state => state.blog.posts[postId]);

  useEffect(() => {
    dispatch(fetchBlogPost(postId));
  }, [dispatch, postId]);

  return (
    <div>
      {/* render blog post */}
    </div>
  );
};

export default BlogPost;

Conclusion

By integrating Redux with react-router, we can implement shareable URLs in our web application. Using URL parameters, we can extract the required state from the URL and dispatch corresponding Redux actions to retrieve the necessary data. This allows users to share specific pages or states of our application easily.

Implementing shareable URL routes not only enhances user experience but also makes our application more SEO-friendly by allowing search engines to index individual pages.

#reactrouter #redux #shareableurls