Ionic 4.1 and React: Navigation

Navigating between pages is a core feature of any mobile application. Let’s look at how we can achieve this with React, React Router and Ionic 4.

For this article, I’m going to assume that you have a React and Ionic 4 application already up and running. If you haven’t done this yet - visit my article on Alligator.io that covers this already.

The core dependencies we’ll need for this project are the following:

$ npm i @ionic/core @ionic/react react-router react-router-dom

Creating Our Pages

For routing to work, we’ll need some pages to route between. Let’s create two new files at src/pages/HomePage.js and src/pages/BlogPage.js

This allows us to define a HomePage:

import React from 'react';
import { IonToolbar, IonTitle, IonContent, IonCard, IonHeader, IonCardHeader, IonCardTitle, IonCardSubtitle, IonCardContent, IonButton } from '@ionic/react'

const HomePage = () => (
  <>
    <IonHeader>
      <IonToolbar color="primary">
        <IonTitle>Home Page</IonTitle>
      </IonToolbar>
    </IonHeader>
    <IonContent>
      <IonCard>
        <IonCardHeader>
          <IonCardSubtitle>Home Page</IonCardSubtitle>
          <IonCardTitle>Let's take a look at the blog</IonCardTitle>
        </IonCardHeader>
        <IonCardContent>
          <p>Sounds like a great idea. Click the button below!</p>

          <IonButton>Blog</IonButton>
        </IonCardContent>
      </IonCard>
    </IonContent>
  </>
)
export default HomePage

And a BlogPage:

import React from 'react';
import { IonToolbar, IonTitle, IonContent, IonCard, IonHeader, IonCardHeader, IonCardTitle, IonCardSubtitle, } from '@ionic/react'

const BlogPage = () => (
  <>
    <IonHeader>
      <IonToolbar color="primary">
        <IonTitle>Blog Page</IonTitle>
      </IonToolbar>
    </IonHeader>
    <IonContent>
      <IonCard>
        <IonCardHeader>
          <IonCardSubtitle>Vue.js</IonCardSubtitle>
          <IonCardTitle>Ionic 4 and Vue.js</IonCardTitle>
        </IonCardHeader>
      </IonCard>
      <IonCard>
        <IonCardHeader>
          <IonCardSubtitle>REACT</IonCardSubtitle>
          <IonCardTitle>Ionic 4 and React</IonCardTitle>
        </IonCardHeader>
      </IonCard>
      <IonCard>
        <IonCardHeader>
          <IonCardSubtitle>ANGULAR</IonCardSubtitle>
          <IonCardTitle>Ionic 4 and Angular</IonCardTitle>
        </IonCardHeader>
      </IonCard>
    </IonContent>
  </>
)
export default BlogPage

Defining Routes

We can then define the routes for our application inside of App.js:

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { BrowserRouter as Router, Route } from 'react-router-dom';

import { IonApp, IonPage, IonRouterOutlet } from '@ionic/react';

import HomePage from './pages/HomePage';
import BlogPage from './pages/BlogPage';

import './App.css';

class App extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <Router>
        <div className="App">
          <IonApp>
            <IonPage id="main">
              <IonRouterOutlet>
                <Route exact path="/" component={HomePage} />
                <Route path="/blog" component={BlogPage} />
              </IonRouterOutlet>
            </IonPage>
          </IonApp>
        </div>
      </Router>
    );
  }
}

export default App;

While we could just define our Route with react-router-dom only, placing the Route inside of an IonRouterOutlet will enable animations within route changes.

Navigating Between Two Pages

Navigating between two pages is therefore as easy as taking history from props and pushing a new Page onto the stack.

Let’s update the HomePage to accommodate this:

const HomePage = ({history}) => (
  <>
    <IonHeader>
      <IonToolbar color="primary">
        <IonTitle>Home Page</IonTitle>
      </IonToolbar>
    </IonHeader>
    <IonContent>
      <IonCard>
        <IonCardHeader>
          <IonCardSubtitle>Home Page</IonCardSubtitle>
          <IonCardTitle>Let's take a look at the blog</IonCardTitle>
        </IonCardHeader>
        <IonCardContent>
          <p>Sounds like a great idea. Click the button below!</p>

          <IonButton onclick={(e) => {
            e.preventDefault();
            history.push('/blog')}}>Blog</IonButton>
        </IonCardContent>
      </IonCard>
    </IonContent>
  </>
)

Pretty simple to achieve as you can see! Here’s the results of our work: