Gatsby page in page

Question

I'm using gatsby js and trying to figure out how to have a page level side bar with Gatsby links that render a new component inside a div in the same page I can do this using react-router-dom but in Gatsby all I can find is how to create blog posts which is driving me nuts as every tutorial I find is the same blog post.

Here is my layout page /layouts/index.js

export default ({ children }) => (
  <div id="layout">
    <header>
      <h3>Header</h3>
      <MainNav />
    </header>
    {children()}
  </div>
)

About Page /pages/about.js

export default ({ location, match }) => {
  console.log('location = ', location, 'match = ', match );
  return (
    <div id="about">
      <SideBar />
      <div id="content">
        // . add child template or component for link clicked in sidebar
      </div>
    </div>
  );
};

What I'm trying to do is when a user clicks on a link in the side bar stay on about but render a new component or template based on the gatsby-link clicked in the about sidebar.

The About SideBar component /components/about/side-bar.js

const SideBar = () => {
  return (
    <div id="side-bar">
      {/* <li><Link to='/about?sort=name'>work</Link></li> */}
      <li><Link to="/about/work">work</Link></li>
      <li><Link to='/about/hobbies'>hobbies</Link></li>
      <li><Link to='/about/buildings'>buildings</Link></li>
    </div>
  )
}

Problem with the links above, they are trying to go to a new page called. /about/work This is not what I'm trying to do. Again I'm trying to make it stay on about but render a new component inside the content div.

Please help gatsby is so all over the place as far as docs goes. ok maybe its just me and not getting the docs clearly. Thanks

UPDATE: I tried adding a page suing createPage which works for me kind of but it doesn't pass the match.params id

gatsby-node.js

exports.createPages = ({ boundActionCreators }) => {
  const { createPage } = boundActionCreators;
  const myComponent = path.resolve('src/pages/about/index.js');
  createPage({
    path: '/about/:id',
    component: myComponent
  })
}

Answer 1

After a long time of trying to understand Gatsby and I can say I still don't as its docs are vast and not very clear. But once I started to look at the node-apis and onCreatePage it gave me some ideas. This is what the docs literally say.

onCreatePage

Called when a new page is created. This extension API is useful for programmatically manipulating pages created by other plugins e.g. if you want paths without trailing slashes.

So the only part in here that gives me a hint of this might be the key to helping me is this line. useful for programmatically manipulating pages created by other plugins

Anyway this got me writing some code at least. Then about 3 hours later I found a plugin that was doing exactly what I was trying to do with this method. The plugin is called gatsby-plugin-create-client-paths key here is client-paths!!!!!

This makes life worth living! So in my case above I just wanted to be able to use Gatsby's router ( which is just react-router-dom behind the scenes), to pass me and id or value to routers match.params object. It still doesn't but what it does do is checks for any path after a prefix like /folder/ in my case '/about/work and recreate the page with a template component (in my case keep using pages/about/index.js), which is my template. Now that we have about/index.js rendering for ever link after /about/ then we can use some internal switch statement to handle the location that is been passed to /about/index.js. Still don't get match.params update but I do get props.location.pathname; which allows me to extract everything after the prefix to use in a switch statement to render my specific components based on the routes pathname. Enough rabbiting on here is a rough solution to show as an example.

So add the plugin as an npm install. open up gatsby.config.js and add the below code to the exports.

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-plugin-create-client-paths`,
      options: { prefixes: [`/about/*`] },
    },
  ]
} 

Then in my main about page pages/about/index

import React from "react";
import SideBar from '../../components/about/side-nav';

export default (props) => {
  const { pathname } = props.location;
  var n = pathname.lastIndexOf('/');
  var pageId = pathname.substring(n + 1);

  const page = () => {
    switch(pageId){
      case '': 
        return (
          <div>Work Page</div>
        );
      case 'work':
        return (
          <div>Work Page</div>
        );
      case 'hobbies':
        return (
          <div>Hobbies Page</div>
        );
      case 'buildings':
      return (
        <div>buildings Page</div>
      );
    }
  }
  return (
    <div id="about">
      <SideBar />
      <div id="content">
        {page()}
      </div>
    </div>
  );
};

Then in my sidebar I call it like this.

  <li><Link to="/about/work">work</Link></li>
  <li><Link to='/about/hobbies'>hobbies</Link></li>
  <li><Link to='/about/buildings'>buildings</Link></li>

Hopefully this will help someone else out. After all this I'm starting to really question the bulk of gatsby especially with docs not been very clear. Based on the response to my question I guess not many people in stackoverflow's community are using Gatsby which is worrying when you need help. It does look like Gatsby's github community is very helpful but that should be for bug issues and not for questions like mine, but encouraging to see.

Hope this helps someone.