Overview

In this challenge, we will focus on creating three components that we will later use as we create a news site similar to Reddit.

Initial Setup

To start, create a new create-react-app project from your terminal: npx create-react-app news-site-i In your new project, copy over the components and data directories under src/ and replace the boilerplate App.js with the one given here.

Each of the three components listed below has been stubbed out - your mission is to create the content that the component should render, and handle the props that are being passed in appropriately. For the first pass of this challenge, all components will be class-based.

Before diving in, it may be helpful to inspect the files in the data directory so you know the shape of the data your app will be handling.

Component I: ArticleTeaser

The ArticleTeaser component should accept the following props from App.js:

id - a number
title - a string
created_date - a string
handleTitleClick - a event handling function

All of these props will always be passed in.

The ArticleTeaser component should:

Display the title inside of an <a> tag.
When the title <a> tag is clicked, it should call this.props.handleTitleClick(this.props.id);. Will arrow functions be useful here?
Display the created_date in a <p> tag.

Component II: Article

In App.js, you'll notice that when the Article component is rendered, we pass {...article} to the component. This is known as the spread syntax. You can read more about it here. Rather than passing the entire article object, we are spreading its properties to be passed down via props. Therefore, the Article component should accept the following props:

title - a string
created_date - a string
abstract - a string
byline - a string (optional)
image - a url string (optional)

The title, abstract, and created_date props will always contain values. image and byline may be set, but they may also be null. Be sure to account for this.

The Article component should:

Display the title inside of an <h1> tag.
Display the created_date in a <p> tag.
Display the byline (if it exists) in an <h2> tag.
Display the image (if it exists) in an <img> tag (the value of image should be set to the src attribute of the <img> tag).
Display the abstract inside of a <p> tag.

Sidenote: Conditional rendering in React

How do I only render something if the data exists? There are several ways we can handle this in React. Here we will explore three common options:

Option 1: &&

// in the render
<ParentComponent>
  {dataExists && <ChildComponent>}
</ParentComponent>

Explanation: If there is just one piece of data we're checking for, we can do a quick existence check which will coerce the data to a boolean value true if the data does exist and then render the component/element that follows &&. If the data doesn't exist, it will be coerced to a boolean value false and will not render the child component/element.

Option 2: Create a helper render function

renderIfDataExists = () => {
  if (dataExists) {
    return <ChildComponent />
  }
};

// in the render
<ParentComponent>
  {this.renderIfDataExists()}
</ParentComponent>

Explanation: This is a common pattern for rendering that involves more complex logic. For example, if our dataExists check was looking for multiple pieces of data, we might want to extract it out into this helper function. (Also note that the above code snippet assumes a class-based React component. What would be different if it were written in a functional component?)

Option 3: Use a ternary operator

<ParentComponent>
  { dataExists ? <ChildComponent /> : '' }
</ParentComponent>

Explanation: This is a good option to use if you are choosing between two different components/elements to render, but you can technically just render an empty string or null as seen above.

Component III: AppNav

The AppNav component should accept the following props:

navItems - an array of navItem objects.
handleNavClick - a function.

The AppNav component should return a <nav> component that contains <a>'s as children - one for every item in the this.props.navItems array.

The AppNav component should:

Map through this.props.navItems to create an array of <a> elements. The objects within this.props.navItems look something like this:

{
  label: "NYREGION",
  value: "nyregion"
}

When transforming/mapping the nav item objects in this.props.navItems into an array of <a> tags, you'll want to use the label property (displayed in the example above) as the text that appears on screen. At the same time, you will want to attach an event handler to each <a>'s onClick event. onClick should call this.props.handleNavClick, and pass the 'value' property from the nav item object.

You are done when all of your data is displayed and your onClick events are firing for your AppNav links and your ArticleTeaser links (i.e. you should see the console.logs)

Now make it Functional!

After you've committed your changes, open a new branch called functional-version. In this new branch, refactor your class-based components into functional ones. This may seem silly, but this is a large part of working in a real legacy React codebase, so understanding how to do these sorts of refactors is critical. Be sure to have BOTH versions of your work -- master as class-based and functional-version as functional. We will continue work on both in the future.

marcson909 / news-site-I