React Timeline

At a Glance

• Individual, stage 1 project
• Due before class on Wed, April 15

Learning Goals

• Build React components which recieve data through props
• Build React container components which pass information to their subcomponents

Objective

We will read information from a JSON file and display it as a social media timeline similar to a Facebook or Twitter feed.

What's Already Here

We've provided for you the following things:

1. An initial application skeleton generated with create-react-app, which loads React and all the tools we need to run the server
2. Several components already defined
3. Data for your Timeline in JSON format

Components

The application will have the following components:

• TimelineEvent - This component will take an individual timeline event data and render it. Each TimelineEvent will contain a person who posted the event, a status message and a timestamp. You will need to use the Timestamp component inside this component.
• Timeline - This component will take a list of timeline events as a prop and render a list of TimelineEvent components.
• App - This component is the traditional outer component of the React App. The App component will read in the data from the JSON file and pass the timeline events to the Timeline component which it will contain.

Hint: An effective strategy could be to implement each component individually testing their output on the screen with hard-coded prop data before trying to integrate the entire app.

Data for your Timeline in JSON

In this project, we also gave you the file src/data/timeline.json. This file holds a JavaScript object that we will load into our App component.

If you look at src/App.js, we see on line 4:

import timelineData from './data/timeline.json';

This line is one way of saying, "Hey! Let's make a variable named timelineData. Its value should be whatever is in the file ./data/timeline.json.

In the App component, we can see the first time we use the variable named timelineData:

  console.log(timelineData);

When we run our React server, we should be able to see this console log print out, and confirm that we get the JSON data that lives in the file data/timeline.json.

We should use the timelineData variable in our App component.

We should also pass timelineData around as a prop if it is appropriate.

Hint: take a few minutes to confirm the shape of timelineData. What are the keys? What are the values? What data structures are nested? How would we access or, better yet, iterate over this?

Already Implemented: Timestamp Component and CSS

We have already implemented some pieces of this project:

• A component Timestamp, that displays a time in a human-readable format
• CSS files. These should be included in the project automatically, but you will need to figure out how to attach the styles to the HTML you render.

Setup Requirements

1. Fork and clone this repo
2. Install this project's dependencies with $ npm install
3. Start the local development server that runs our React project with $ npm start

Wave 1

For wave 1 implement the TimelineEvent component function. It should take 3 props.

• person - the person making the post.
• status - the message being posted.
• timestamp - the date-time of the event.

Test the component by rendering it with hardcoded data inside the App component. TimelineEvent should use the existing Timestamp component to render the time & date of the event.

Wave 2

For wave 2, you will implement the Timeline component. The Timeline component will take one prop, events, an array of JavaScript objects. The render function will use the array to render a set of TimelineEvent components.

Then read in the /src/data/timeline.json file into an array of objects in /src/App.js. In the render function of the App component, render a TimeLine component using the array of objects as the events prop.

Sample Solution

Below is a sample solution:

Going Further

Add some styling to the application to make it look more like a social media feed.

What We Are Looking For

You can check here for things the instructors will be looking for.