Introduction to the Vue. js 3 Router | Chris Dixon | Skillshare
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Introduction to the Vue. js 3 Router

teacher avatar Chris Dixon, Web Developer & Online Teacher

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Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:28

    • 2.

      Setup & Router Package Overview

      9:25

    • 3.

      RouterLink & RouterView

      8:39

    • 4.

      Params & Queries

      12:39

    • 5.

      Nested Routes

      8:02

    • 6.

      Router Classes

      3:30

    • 7.

      Fallback Pages

      5:18

    • 8.

      Programmatic Navigation

      5:50

    • 9.

      Thank You

      0:49

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About This Class

If you are new to the Vue Router, this is the class for you!

This series is all about the Vue.js Router package. In particular, we will be covering Vue 3 and Vue Router version 4.

This class is for anybody with a little Vue.js (or possibly other frameworks) experience, looking to learn about how to use routing in single page applications. No router experience is necessary, we cover everything from the ground up!

What is covered in this class: -

  • - What is the Vue Router?
  • - The role of the router in single page applications
  • - Setting up a new Vue.js 3 project with Vite
  • - The routes object & configuration
  • - The difference between component and view files
  • - Switching between pages using RouterLink
  • - The "to" prop and working with static and dynamic paths -
  • Named routes
  • - Displaying pages with Router View
  • - Accessing full router and current route information in the template
  • - Using with script setup
  • - Setting up dynamic segments in our router object
  • - Dynamic URL params
  • - Passing and accessing Query strings
  • - Creating dynamic URL segments
  • - Adding additional routes
  • - Nesting routes inside other pages or components
  • - Using the children array
  • - How to see which classes are added automatically
  • - The difference between router-link-active and router-link-exact-active
  • - How classes are added with nested vue routes
  • - Partial and full URL matches
  • - Where to update CSS styling
  • - How to handle users visiting unrecognised router/url's
  • - Creating fallback/404 pages
  • - Accessing unrecognised params
  • - Handling multiple fallback pages and partial matches
  • - Accessing the route and router information in both the script and template
  • - The vue router push() method and include it in the script and template
  • - The vue router replace() method
  • - Browser history -
  • - Navigating browser history with the go, back, and forward router methods.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy the class!

Meet Your Teacher

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Chris Dixon

Web Developer & Online Teacher

Top Teacher

Hello, My name is Chris and I am a Web Developer from the UK. I am an experienced trainer leading web development bootcamps and also teaching online courses.

My main areas of interest are Vue.js, WordPress, Shopify, Javascript, eCommerce, and business. I am passionate about what I do and about teaching others. 

Whatever your reason for learning to build websites you have made an excellent career choice.

My personal motivation was to become my own boss and have more freedom and flexibility in my life. I also enjoy the technical challenge it provides and the way it constantly evolves. I built my first website back in 1999 and I have watched the web evolve into what it is today.

I try to make my courses enjoyable and try to remember what it was like wh... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey, welcome to this class all about the view router and more specifically the package which is compatible with view version three, which is the View Router version four. The view route package at its core will allow us to switch between pages in our applications, but there is also a lot more to it than just that. This is an introduction class which includes most of the essential topics you will need to get going. We start at the beginning by creating a new VGS version three project with the routes package covering the requirements we need to get going. Then we cover the contents, including the route of files, what all of these files mean, and where to set up the routes which allows to switch between these pages. Continuing on, you will learn how to set up the links to switch between pages, and also discover how we have full control over where the page content is played. We'll learn how to create dynamic page URLs so we can include variables such as the current user into our routes. Working with parameters and query strings are important too when switching between pages and the view router package also has us covered, enabling us to pass information between routes and also covering extracting information passed into form inputs. Routing is not always as simple as just a set of links which map to each page. We may also have the need for nested route two and we also have this covered. In our examples, we cover CSS styling to apply to not only our links, but also based on if the current route is active. We cover fall back pages and how to enable routing inside of Javascript. Who am I? My name is Chris, and I have been involved in web development from a young age and also been teaching online and in person for over a decade. I use GS and the route in my own projects. I have firsthand experience, although ViewGS knowledge is not strictly required, a little exposure to this will really help you understand this class as we do not cover the view part in any great detail. If coming from a different front end framework such as react, you should also be fine to follow along to. Finally, I thank you for taking the time to view this class and I hope you find it useful for learning the view router package. 2. Setup & Router Package Overview: Welcome to the series where we're going to take a look at the view route package. In particular we'll take a look at how to add the router and make use of it using view version free. If you've never used a router before in any other frameworks or libraries, it's basically a package which we can use to switch between pages of views. Why do we need a package to do this in the first place? Well, generally, when building applications or websites with UGS, we're building something called a single page application. A single page application can sound pretty deceptive. It doesn't mean our website is only one single page. What it means is behind the scenes, when we first visit a website or app, one single Javascript file is generally downloaded. This is one big bundle of Javascript which comes from the server. Then on the front end, we need to handle how we need to switch between various pages or components in this bundle using more traditional based web technologies such as Php or Ruby on Rails. What we generally do when clicking on at different pages or navigation links, this will request a new page from the server. But with single page applications, we already have all of the Java scripts bundled on. The first request, we need to switch between these various parts when dealing with a router package, such as the view router. It's not just about switching between pages, though. There are generally a lot more features which we can discover too, and we'll see a lot of these throughout this series. The View Router package is also officially supported and maintained by the core View GS team. It's deeply integrated, supported, and kept up to date. If you want to keep things really simple, there is also a CDN link which you can use for the view router. But for this demonstration, I'm going to make use of a build tool. I'm going to make use of the Vt package. Vt is effectively going to allow us to scaffold or create a new view dress application. And it will give us a lot of nice features such as hot module replacements, which will automatically update the browser. Each time we make changes to our project without any further talking, we'll get on with creating a new project. For this, I'm going to make use of visual studio code. Jump into the terminal, which is built in here. We can see on the VGS documentation. To create a new view application, we need to use MPM in view. At latest, you must make sure that you have the latest or a current version of node JS installed. You can test this by typing MPM v for version in, it's currently on version eight. Then we can use the CD command to change into any directory which you want to move to. In my case, I'm going to change into the desktop to install this project. And then we can run the init command. This is MPM view at latest. The convenient thing about creating a new view free project is we can also install the view router package at this stage. If we need to install any additional packages, that's fine. The project name just say view router. A typescript? No, we don't need JSX. We can add the view router because that's the purpose of the series. We don't need any state management or testing. Okay, and let's open this up inside of visual studio code, drag this in. You may also need to reopen the terminal. And from here, just before we move on any further, we need to run MPM install to install all the no packages which we need. Okay? The last step which we need is MPM run dev to run our development server. So we can see our project inside the browser. Copy this link or command and control click to open this up. We've now successfully created a new view free project. One of the things which you will instantly notice if you installed the view route at this stage is we have two links to switch between. We have the home link and also the about page. We have some routing functionality out of the box, but we also need to add our own routes and our own features too. Let's take a look behind the scenes and see how this happens. If we go into the source folder, in the router folder, we have this index. You'll see at the very top of this file we already have the view router package installed since we added this when we set up the project. This is importing two things from this package. The first one is Create router, which you can see just here. This creates a new router object with all of our routes and configuration. You can see inside, we can choose between history or we can also set up hash mode. And we'll take a look at this later, but probably the time where you'll spend most of the work with the router is inside of this route array. If we take a look insider here, each one of our routes is set up as an object. For the most simple one here, we set up a file path. And this is just the home directory. This is the one we see when we simply go to our project URL. This is a name or an alias which we give to each one of these routes and we can references later when we set up our links component, which we want to display. When we're on this page, we've imported something called the home view. We can see at the top, this home view is pulled in from the views folder. Take a look at sidebar, open up the views and we have our home and our about view. If we open up any of these two route of views inside of here, we'll look pretty familiar if you've done any work with VGS in the past and these are set up exactly the same as a regular view GS component. We have the template which adds our HML code to the page. We can have an optional style section, and also we can have a script section two. These look exactly the same as our components, which we can see here. The only difference in terms of structure is we are organizing these into a views folder. We know which ones we need to switch between with the router. Just to clarify, a component can be any single piece or any single section of our page, but we make sure that our views folder contains the routes which you want to switch between with the router. Back to the route index page, we can scroll down and see our second router object. This has the path forward slash about. We can also type this in, it's enter, and we then take into the about page. This also has a router name, but the difference between our two route here is the first one directly reference to components and the second one is doing something called an import. As we can see here, we have some comments above. This is telling us that rather than directly importing our components, including this with the rest of the package, we are segregating our about's view. So we can make use of something called lazy loading. This is one of the other features of the view router package. It's also capable of this lazy loading. As mentioned before, when we first visit a single page application and type in the URL, this will download the full Javascript bundle from the server. However, though sometimes we don't want this big bundle, it could be a really big application. What we can do rather than having one single jar script file is we can split these into separate files. This is what's happened here. We've segregated the about view into a separate file. This is only downloaded from the server when we click on the about link. If you want to, we could also change to be a regular component just like above, let's say About view. We would also need to import this just like above. We'll import the about view. This is alongside the home view. We just need to change the name. Say this. Vt will automatically refresh the page. We can still switch between these two routes. Finally, we need to include this router inside of our view package. So we export this at the bottom and then into the main file. This exported router file is then imported into our main Javascript file. The rest is regular views. We create a new view GS application, which is stored inside of app. Then we can add this router package to our application before it's then mounted to the dom. 3. RouterLink & RouterView: Previously we set up a view free project. We installed the view router package. We briefly looked at the router options. The router's index page has its pass inside of our route objects which map to a particular component. For example, fold about will render this view called About view. We can see this if we look on our two links here over on the right, we switch between our two views. But currently, there still may be a little bit of mystery behind how exactly both of these links are switching these URL's. This is because these two links are being added by defaults when we set up our project. Let's take a look behind the scenes and see how we can set these up ourselves and also add additional ones to for this project. Our links have automatically been set up in the app view, but they can also live in any other component. Two, we can see at the top, we need to import something from the view router package. And that's something which we need is a router link component. This is all the code we've seen. On the left hand side, we have the view logo, which you see here. We have the Hello World components with the message. Then we have our two nav links. Down at the bottom here, we'll make use of the router link components which we imported from the view router package. You can see this has an attribute called 22 is the location which we want to link to when this is clicked on and we have the text of home and about which links to these two URLs. You may also be wondering why not just use the regular HML a element to link between pages inside. Here we can make use of a forward slash or we could also say about, well, it's preferred to use the router link over the traditional A elements when using view GS for multiple reasons. One of the big differences is when we're using history mode like we currently are, the view router package needs to intercept the click from any one of these links and prevent the browser from refreshing the page, which it does automatically. When using view GS or a single page application. We don't need this page refresh since we automatically have all of the jarvscript code available in the bundle which we can switch between. Let's remove this. Also, just as a quick side note two, if you use the view router package based on view two, you may have used the tag prop which looks just like this. We used to use this to set exactly what type of HML element we wanted this to be rendered as, but this is no longer available to use in this package. Also, when using route to link, we are not just limited to passing in a static string to our two prop just like we are here. We can also pass in any dynamic data which you want to. For example, we may have a user and want to link to a particular user ID. Let's go to our script. We'll set up a constant called user, which is going to be an object. But before we do this, we'll wrap this in ref. We need to import ref from the view package if you've not seen this before. This is a view free feature which means that all of the contents inside will be kept reactive. And therefore, any component which relies on this data will be updated each time there is a change from here, we can pass in our data as an object and we'll say something like name the user ID. Since we are making use of script set up, our user will be automatically returned back from our script and made available to use. No template. We can open this in the double de braces, there's a data which we need, but we can also make use of this inside of the two prop. Let's duplicate this, we'll take a look at an example. We still need double quotes to surround all of this, but we can make use of the Javascript bactics to introduce Javascript variables. We may want to go to something like forward slash user. Then using the dollar symbol and the curly braces, we can out our dynamic data such as our user ID. Let's just say user. But if we were to go up to the browser and try this out, this would cause an issue. Let's try this. Click on the user. Inside of this link key, we see the user ID rather than the dynamic value. We just like with anything else in View free, when we're using dynamic data, we also need to use the V bind syntax, which is a colon. And this tells View GS not to render this as a string, but instead to take into account the values of the availables which we pass inside now if we click on the user. This will now include the dynamic data which we need. This starts to give us some idea of the flexibility we have with the view router. We can also extend even further by passing in an object. Again, since we're making use of dynamic data or Java Script, we need to include the colon remove this. We can then our string passing the Javascript object. It's most simple. This Javascript object can simply contain the path which we just looked at, forward slash. The same for the about link, passing an object for the path, but this one was forward about. This should still work exactly the same as before. We'll see how two links are working at the top. W would have spell this correctly. This works fine, but this is just a simple example, and we don't have any additional functionality from what we had before. But we can instead pass to this object a reference to the names which we already gave these routes in the router file. If you remember from the previous video inside the routers index page, each one of these routes had a unique name property we had home and about. We can references inside of our object, this one passing the name of home. In fact, this was lower cases must match. And also for about, let's try this one out. You may be wondering why we've gone to all this effort when it works exactly the same as it did originally. Well, one of the reasons and one of the benefits of using name is re, usability. If you think about this, if we had this about us router link in multiple locations in our project and then one day we may be decided rather than having the link to be forward slash about, we may want to change it to something like forward slash about us. Well, rather than going into each one of our views or components and changing this link, all we need to do is to go into our router file and change the path to about us. This name would be still relevant and it would still work in all of our components. That's just changes back. Okay, the next thing to discover is something called Route of View. We've discovered how we can switch between our pages using the router link, which we have here. But we've also imported something called Route of view. This route of view is responsible for rendering our page onto the screen. Inside the app, we have this head section, which, because of the default styling, has placed this over on the left. Then over on the right, the contents of our two views are displayed. The reason this happens is because we've placed the route of view at the bottom of this file. This is the outlet for our content. For example, if you wanted to remove this and place this in a different location, it now moves to the left. This gives us the full flexibility of where we render the contents of our pages. 4. Params & Queries: The view routes package also has much more to offer than just switching between components. It can also be used to pass data in the form of params and also query strings to when working with URL's, just like we are here, we are currently working with the home and the forward about link. We also may want to add additional pieces of information such as Pam, just like a user. And often we may want pieces of additional information, such as queries, past URL, these have a question mark like this. And then we'll see some additional information such as this. Now we want to take a look at how we can work with both params, inquiries inside of the view router. Let's go over to our app view where we have our two router links. First we'll take a look at params or parameters which are like variables for a given route in the router link. We can add these inside of our two prop. Remember earlier we looked at adding variables just like we had here. And this is the commented out example. What we want to do is to remove the name route. In fact, we'll just comment this out and then duplicate this. So we're going to keep this fully intact. We can set up the path just like we had earlier. This is going to link to a particular user ID, which we have stored in this object. The path, since we're using variables, we can set these with the bactics. We'll say forward user, then we may want to have the user ID like we have here using job script places in with user ID changes to the user link. Then we can see we've got this user link now updated. And if we click on this, we'll see our user. And then the variable which is just afterwards, this is our ID of 1234, but we don't currently have a corresponding component to render. What we're going to do is to change the about view, we'll say user view. We're changing this. We also need to go over to our router. And then the index JS, we'll change the about view, the user view. This is being updated here too. The second component, the name of user. Now we also need to change this to be forward slash user. Now if we click on this, we'll still see, even though we own forward slash user, that we have an issue inside the console. We don't have any matches for forward slash user, then forward our user ID. This is because we are not taking into account the full URL With this path, we're going to have a variable we could if we wanted to add forward 1234, keep this hard coded. And then we see we are taken to the about page and it changes to user page, it's consistent, we can still see we are taken to the correct page. But the problem we may have is if we have a different user ID, if we have somebody else login, this route is not going to be found. Instead, we need to be able to capture any different URL which is added and effectively treat this section as a variable. The way to do this in the routers index page is rather than having a hard coded value like this, we can use the colon capture the value inside of a variable called ID. Now the view router package now understands that this section, or this segment of the URL is a variable and could change and it will still render our user view. Now we can type in anything we want to, and this is always displayed. The next thing to think of is how can we get this user information into our page or components? Well, if we think about this, if this is a user and we want to grab the unique user ID, we may want to display this or something like the user name in the components. The way to do this is by using this variable name which we gave inside the path. Remember we've called this ID. If we go to the user view, we can access the current route information inside the double calibraces using $1 symbol route. Say this refresh. We can see all of the current route information is displayed. We have the full path which is exactly what we see inside the URL bar. We have the name which we set up in the router file. We also have the params where we can see the ID is currently matching what we have here. This is exactly how we can access this ID information inside of our component. We are currently displaying the route. Since this is an object, we can say DopamD to capture this value which is entered. Let's try this route. Peramsd. Now any value which we add in its ID segment is going to be displayed inside of the template. Also, just as a side note two. As well as using dollar symbol route, we can also access dollar symbol router. This gives us a little bit more information about all of the router features. We can see things such as the options where we have the history mode set. We can see the current route. We can see all of our routes which is set up as an array. Here we have the home and also the second route which is our user. This is all the same route information we have set up inside of our router page. Once again, dollar symbol router will give you more information about the full router package. Dollar symbol route will only display information about the current route which we are visiting. This isn't always the way we want to go if we want to access variables or information in our template. We may also want to include these in our Jar script. To the way we can do this if we're using the composition API, which we currently are, Let's say we have a script and we'll make use of script set up. We can also import these from the router package use route. We can see here by the information, this is the equivalent of dollar symbol route which we just used. This is all the information about our current route including the params if you wanted to. You could also import use router. This is the equivalent of dollar symbol router. We want to import these from the view router package. Then we access these just like we would do with any other composables in view. We use route, we call them as a function and store the return value inside of a variable. Let's say cont route is equal to this. Then if we duplicate this, we can also access the router place. In a console log route we rush and we can see the information is placed inside of our tag object. We have the name, the params, the queries which we're going to look at soon, the full path which we are currently on. Now we are free to use any pieces of these information inside of our code. It's also worth noting too, you can have multiple dynamic segments inside the URL as well as this. You could also say forward and insert a new variable insider here. Then all you need to do is to go to the routers index page and set up a new variable to capture this information. Now this will be available using this name. As well as this, the view router can also handle query strings. Two, if you've not used a query string before, they get a way of passing some additional information in a URL, just like we looked at early on. You may have seen a URL which looks just like this. Let's go back to our first or our home URL. You may see something which looks like this with a question mark. And then we can say user is equal to any particular string. Then we can add multiple pieces of information separated by the ampersand say plan equal to monthly, the name. We can go on and on and add as many of these as we want to so we can access our user. We can access our plan and we can access our name because these are separated after this question mark. Let's take a look at how we can use these. These pre strings can be accessed locally or they can also be sent to the server. A typical use case for this would be with HTML form. Let's go over to view. Let's place in a form remove action. Since we want view GS to handle this, we'll quickly set up a form with an input type of text. The name is going to be equal to user. This name section, when working with queries, is going to be really important. We'll see this inside the query string. Let's just set up one more. We'll say the location, an input, the name of location. Then finally a button to submit. This form of submit any text inside of here is fine to see this. Go over to the browser, make sure we are on the user out, fill in the name, the location, and hit Send. You can see instantly as soon as you do this, separated by a question mark, We have our two pieces of information. We have the user equal to Chris and also the location equal to UK. And both of these are captured since we've added the name attribute to each one of our inputs, both the user and also the location will be sent to the server with the form when we submit. If you don't know anything about forms or sending forms to the server, don't worry about that information. All we need to know here is with this example and when using forms, these queries or these query strings added to our URL automatically. But when working with the view router package, we can also add these manually two and access them inside of all pages or components. Let's go over to our app View, which has our router links. For this one we'll place it inside the home link, inside the object separated by a comma, we can set up our query which is equal to an object. Then inside of here, just like any other object, we'll add our object key and our object values. For this example, let's place it in a token, which can be any string of text. You can also insert variables inside of here if you want to give a save. Now access is token inside of our components. Since we on the home link jump into the home view from here inside the double calibraces, Again, we can access dollar symbol route for the current route into the home link. That's all of our information And you can see inside of here we have this query which is equal to our token. We can narrow this downward route query, which gives us our token, and we can also just access the value with token. If you also take a look at the URL, you can see how token has now been applied. This is a convenient way of passing small pieces of information between our route. Something such as access, tokens use ID's or any small piece of information. 5. Nested Routes: As mentioned earlier on in these lessons, the view router is really flexible. Currently though, we are not using the full flexibility it offers. All we have is inside of this app view, we have our two router links to switch between our paths. We are out putting these inside of a single route of view. This isn't very flexible. This is just simply saying that we have our two links and all of the content from any additional links will always be in the same location. But let's change things around a little bit and see how we can deal with some different situations. Let's reinstate the user a simple path also. We'll duplicate this and create the user account area inside the path. This is still going to be dynamic, so we can say forward account, then we can place in our user ID. Have this up at the top, so it's user ID. We also need to set this up inside of our routers index. For this copy, any one of these routes pace in the name of account and will also create a new component called account view. Remember, we changed the user section so we can remove the dynamic segments, but we do need to add this onto our account area. This is forward accounts, we'll select the user ID creates a new view inside of our views folder. Duplicate any one of these. This one is the account view. Clear all of this up, some text inside of here. We also do need to import this inside the rout to file, copy and paste. And this one is the account view. Should all be working fine. Now we have the home, the user, and also the account. This is also pointing to how we use ID and displaying the new component which we just created. Going back to the purpose of this video, we're going to take a look at nested routes. The idea behind nested routes is using these links. Currently, we're replacing all of this section on the left because of our route of view. But what about if we didn't want to, for example, replace the full account page? Instead, we maybe want to place some views below this, such as some previous orders or even the user's profile. To see this as an example, let's go back into our views and we'll create two new views. Copy and paste this. One is use orders. Just change the text to be orders. Then copy and paste this one. And this can be update profile, change the text, make sure both of these are saved into the app view. And we can link both of these down at the bottom with a router link. The first one is going to be update profile and the second one for our new view which is previous orders. As mentioned before, we don't want these two links to simply override all of the additional content above and display inside of our routes of view. Instead, since both of these new routes are linked to our accounts, it may make sense to have both of these as child routes of this account look like this. We can copy this full two section, paste this in. But instead of going to forward slash account, then user ID, we then link to update for our previous orders. This will look similar, but this one would be forward slash orders. Save this, and then go to our routers index where you can import our two new views. Duplicate this twice. This one is update profile, cover this and add it to the path. And the second one is for use orders. This now leaves us in a position where we have two new routes to handle. We have one path, which will be forward slash accounts, and then forward slash. We want to grab the user ID, so we want to use the colon for this. We can stall this inside a variable, then forward slash update. The second one which you want to handle is the same, forward slash orders. One option is to create two new route objects here for both of these URL's. This, however, is not ideal because as we've already talked about, going to, any one of these new views will replace the account page. But we want to have these placed inside. To deal with this inside of our account route object, we can add a children array. This children array will declare which components should be nested inside of this top level account page. This is how it looks just after our components will place in the children array. Each one of these children is an object which is going to take in the path and also the component. All we need to do is to add forward update. But instead of adding this at the top level, we add this inside of the child path. When we land on this URL, we're going to display the component which is update profile separated by comma. We can also do forward orders which will render our we use orders. We got two route handled and we can now remove these. This should be already. Now to test this out, we've got two new links at the bottom. Click on Update profile, We can see straightway. We'll go to Fold account, then fold the user ID, which is this section just here. Then fold update also. Let's test out the previous orders. Click on this, again, the same account, the user ID, and then fold orders is added to the end. Okay, you may be thinking, great. We inside the account view, we can see this text on the left, but we don't see any reference to our two children components. Well, for this, we need to tell VGS exactly where we want these components to display. If we go into the account view, the view router doesn't have any idea where about we want to display this inside of the template. We need to tell it by adding an additional router view. Okay, let's go to our accounts without any of the additional contents. Below, click on Update Profile. We see this text of Update profile, which is just here. Finally, click on Previous Orders. There's our orders text, which we have set up here. Both of these are now displayed inside of the route of view from our account. The formatting looks a little bit strange at the minute because of the CSS. In fact, we can probably see this a little bit better if we go into the source assets. We can remove all the styling from here. It should now look a little bit more clear. We've got the account page at the top and then use no route of view just below. We can then see our nested child routes. 6. Router Classes: Next we're going to take a look at active classes and how view JS router applies these automatically to our links. If you look closely, we are currently on the home link and this has the slightly darker color. Click on the user. This darker color should now be applied to the user. This happens for each one of our links. This is useful if we wanted to adjust the styling for any one of our links and let the user know which route they're currently on. The way it does this if we go into the developer tools and right click and inspect, keeping the elements tab and use the inspector to click on one of our links. Currently we are on the home route. If we take a look at the class, we can see this is router link active. And also a second class of router link exact active. This is not currently on any of the following links, but if we click on the user, these classes are now moved over to the user link. The same for account, this is our account link. And they are no longer applied to the first two. But something different happens if we click on Update Profile. As with the previous links, update profile gets the two additional classes of router link active and also router link exact active. However, the difference is this account section also has this single class of router link active. The same happens if we click on previous orders. The previous orders link gets our two additional classes. And also the account page has this single class added. First of all, these classes are added automatically by the view router. And this can allow us to update the styling for the current page. What's the difference between router link active and router link exact active? Well, the difference lies in this account page. If you've watched the previous videos, you'll know that the account page has both the update profile and the previous orders nested as child routes. The account links us to forward slash account, then the user ID. If we click on update profile, the same URL is in place, but with update at the end with previous orders, this is also added to the end. What happens here is with the previous orders and update profile. This begins with forward slash accounts. Therefore, the forward slash account link just here is considered a partial match. If any of our links are a partial match, we'll get the class of router link active. Since this technically is currently active. But as the name suggests with the other links, the class of router link exact active is only applied if there is an exact match with ORL. This is the current case for update profile. If we click on Orders, this link here is an exact match for our URL. This also gets the exact class and also the same for any other links, we click on the user. Not only is this a partial match, but it's also an exact match. We see both classes applied. The reason these are styled the way they are is because by default, when we set up the view router inside of the app view, it applies some styling to the bottom section. If we scroll down, we have our nav links, the A elements and also a different color for the class of router link exact, active. This is how we can add styling to our active links both for a full and also a partial match. 7. Fallback Pages: It's also important to handle what happens if the user lands on the wrong part of our app or a page which doesn't exist. For example, if we just added anything onto the end of this, this account is fine because we have a section inside of our route to file which handles any variable piece of information just after our account. But if we replace the full section with something random, we don't see any content rendered in our route of view. For this, we can set up a general catch all component such as a 44 page, which will display if no other routes are a match. For this, let's go over to our components and create a new file called not Found of view. Then a simple template insider here is fine, with the heading of page not found. Okay, to use this over in our router, we need to import this at the very top of the file. Import not found. This is in components not found. Then at the end of our route array, I'm going to create a new object to handle this. Set this up just like the object above. We must set up a path as we always do. But we'll come back to this in just a moment. We'll add a name not found, then we'll render our component. If you've used the route of a view two in the past, we used to be able to catch all other routes which aren't matched above by simply adding a star. But now using view version three and the view route of four, we need to instead use a custom parameter. We do this just like the dynamic segments we added just above. Instead of the star, we'll add a forward and then a dynamic segment which will capture in the variable called path name. This name of path name can be anything which you choose. The difference between View router 2.3 is also that we now need to add a regular expression which is the star. And this will match any given route name. Now if we're typing any URL which is not recognized by any other routes, we'll see our page not found. Let's try one more. This is fine. Click on our Recognized links and it still renders the correct component. If we wanted to, we could also access any one of these params which is entered, such as this string of text. And we can do this inside the not found component, just like we've previously looked out. We can access the dollar symbol route. We have access to our path name, which is the same name which we gave inside the router. But what about if we had multiple segments? If the user entered something like this? We can see the Pam is still output inside of the template. However, the router displays this as a string of text rather than two separate parameters if you wanted to break them up into multiple values to have access to them, such as this section and also this section, we can instead create an array of params to set this up. Jump back into our router. We add an additional start at the end of the path. Now if we save and go back, rather than having a string of parameters like we had before, we now have an array containing two separate values. This now gives us the option to use these parameters individually if we needed to. Also, the view router is really flexible. We don't just have to have one single page not found. We could have 44 pages for different incorrect segments. For example, if this was admin and the last segment was incorrect, we maybe want to show a different 44 page for any admin related errors. The way to do this is to go back over to our outer, let's duplicate this last section, Pac above. We could then select the path forward admin. Then any unrecognized section which is added afterwards, will be stored in its parameter called path name. Or you could also rename this to be more descriptive if you wanted to. But the idea here is simply the path name will only store this segment rather than the full URL which we had before. We could then customize our not found page to suit this exact route. Let's just remove this example from before go into, we'll add this inside of the P element and we'll say no admin page found for then we can output our dynamic section, we'll say dollar symbol route. Then we can access the path property which we are currently on its enter, there's our error message down at the bottom. This is an example of how we can create one single 44 page not found component. Or we can also be more specific and tailor these messages to suit our particular route. 8. Programmatic Navigation: But now we've been looking at how we can change between our pages or components using the router link. The router link will place a button on our page, which we can click on to display the desired component. But there's also other ways we can use to switch between pages inside of our app. We can also do it programmatically rather than relying on these buttons. Earlier we briefly looked at accessing the routers instance using dollar symbol router. This can be accessed inside of our script or inside of our template and it gives us access to things such as params in our code. This also exposes many other things too, such as the ability to navigate using methods such as push. This means we can also build in navigation into things like our methods in the script or also into any click listeners inside of our template. For example, let's place in a level one heading anywhere inside of our wrap, I'll just say site title. What we can do here is listen off for a click on this element where we can access our dollar symbol router. And a method called push, which is going to push us to a desired location. If this is a title, it would make sense to maybe link this back to our home URL. Let's see how this works inside the browser. Go to any other page. It's a bit messy now, but click on the site title. This then takes us back to the home URL. We'll try one more. Go to the user, click the site title, and this all works fine. Also, we can make use of the push method and all the other methods which we're going to look at inside of our script. And also the set up function if we go into our user view inside of here we can also access router push and make use of this inside of our script. We'll try this out. Let's say we'll push to any made upRL such as test. Then what we'll do to try this out is we'll wrap this inside of a set time out, passing any function which will run after 2 seconds. So we can cut this code out, paste this into our time out. Let's go over to the page and jump into the user view. Then 2 seconds later our function is run and we're pushed to forward test. This thing may be useful for pushing a user to the counter area after logging in, Since we can also access this inside of our methods too. Let's now remove this set time out and also go back to our app dot view where we can take a look at another method called replace. This one is doll symbol replace this. Just like the router push and all the other methods we'll discover can also be used inside of the script set up. Let's give this a safe click on the account or any other page in the site title. Again, just like the push method, we're also taken back to the home URL. This works very similar to the push method, but there is a difference. When navigating inside the browser, each one of the pages which we visit is added to the previous history of entries. This is how we can use these back and forward buttons inside the browser. But the difference between these two methods is when using the push method, all of these entries are still added to the history of the browser. However, as it sounds, with the replace method, it will replace the current entry rather than adding two. To say this, let's refresh to clear the history. Click on the account. Now click on the site title to take us back to the home page. Now if we click on the back button, you would expect to be taken back to the account. We don't, because this replace has replaced the previous route rather than added to the history. We can see the difference. If we go to push again, refresh, we'll go to the account page, click the site title. But if we click the back button, since all of the history is saved in the browser, this is then taken back to the previous account page. Another router method we have access to is, and this will navigate through the browser entries as we've just learned there. When we go through various pages inside of our application, all of these pages are stored in order inside the browser history. We can then navigate back or forward through as many of these history entries as we want to. If we wanted to go back to pages, when we click on this, we can use Router do go passing a value of negative two. Let's try this out. We'll go back to the home route. We'll go to the user, we'll go to the account, we'll go to Profile. Now, two steps backwards would be our user, click on the site title and we're taking back to the user route. If we were only going back or forward one single page. It is also two methods we can use which is back and also forward have access to forward and this doesn't need any arguments passed to this. We also have, as you would expect, if we clear the history, go to the home account. This takes us back one step to the previous history item, which is the user. There's also other router methods available too. If you're interested in finding out more, you can find out more information on the view router documentation page. But for now though, these are some of the more common methods which you can use in your project. 9. Thank You: Congratulations, You've now reached the end of this class. I hope you've enjoyed this class and also now have a deeper understanding of the view router package and what it can do for your view GS projects. We now know that routing is not always just as simple as picking on a link and redirecting to a new page. We've covered a lot of the view router packages, features such as passing information between routes. We've used query strings, we've used parameters. We've used dynamic routes to allow us to use variables inside of our URL's. We've covered how to set up nested navigation, how to apply styling to various link states, and so much more. So a big thank you for me for taking the time to view this class. I hope you've enjoyed it and I will see you in another class soon.