Breadcrumbs are a way of providing additional navigation to website visitors. With breadcrumbs, a user can easily understand their current location on the website. This Answer will cover the basics of breadcrumbs and how we can use react-router
to implement them in a React application.
The term breadcrumbs comes from a fairy tale called
In simple terms, breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation that allow users to track their locations within a website. However, breadcrumbs are not only for websites, we might see them in applications and software.
Take a look at the following image:
The above screenshot was taken from the bestbuy.com.
In this image, we can see items including “Laptops”, “All Laptops,” “MacBooks,” and others in the menu tab. This secondary navigation is called the breadcrumb. Usually, breadcrumbs are separated by the “>” or any such symbol. There are different types of breadcrumbs, such as location-based, attribute-based, path-based, history-based, and hybrid. The following are the benefits of using breadcrumbs:
There is no need to implement breadcrumbs in the website if it doesn’t have a complex structure or is a single-level website. Let’s see how we can leverage different react-router
functionalities to implement breadcrumbs in a React application.
Let’s create a React application first, then install the react-router-dom
to use the react-router
. In this Answer, we’ll use CRA (create-react-app) template to create a React app. The following commands can be used to create a React app.
npx create-react-app breadcrumbs
Once the command above is executed, change the project directory using cd
and install the react-router-dom
library.
cd breadcrumbs
npm install react-router-dom
The following coding widget can be used to implement the code.