Learn Algolia, Leaflet and Nightmare

If you've ever worked on a website for a business, there's a good chance you've included a map.

A Google Map embed is sufficient for showing a location, but doesn't leave you many customization options.

React Leaflet to the rescue!

In this course, Colby Fayock will guide you through a series of lessons and challenges that will build your map making skills as you build out a web app for a fictional restaurant.

You'll get practice with handling API keys and using React Hooks to implement a custom interactive map complete with metadata and additional overlays.

This course has built-in challenges that you are encouraged to pause and work through, but feel free to just watch.

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

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Build Maps with React Leaflet

In this collection, you'll learn the basics of creating a new map in your React application with React Leaflet. We'll walk through adding the map itself as well as adding markers with popups, different shapes, and increasingly complex features to your map!

Mapping with React Leaflet

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

In this lesson, you will learn how to add a map to your React application using React Leaflet. We will walk through importing and configuring the Map and TileLayer components from React Leaflet to set up the new map.

Create a New Map using React Leaflet

In this lesson, you will learn how to add a Marker and Popup component to a Map when using React Leaflet. We'll walk you through importing the components and adding each one to the Map. Additionally, we'll resolve an issue with loading marker images that's inherent to creating a new React Leaflet map in Create React App, which we'll fix by manually importing the image from Leaflet and configuring those images to the marker.

Add a React Leaflet Marker with a Popup to a Map

In this lesson, you will learn how to add the Polygon and Circle shape components to a Map when using React Leaflet. We'll walk you through importing both components, adding each component to the Map, and setting a unique color for each shape.

Add Shapes to a Map in React Leaflet

In this lesson, you'll learn how to style shapes on your map to change the look and feel using React Leaflet's API. We'll use React component props like color and weight on our shapes to change the colors and styles.

Style React Leaflet Shapes using Component Props

In this lesson, you'll learn how to use CSS to style and animate shapes on your React Leaflet map. We'll use the className prop to add a custom class and add CSS to customize our shapes.

Style and Animate a React Leaflet Shape with Custom CSS

In this lesson, you will learn how to use React hooks to interface with the Leaflet Map API in React Leaflet. We'll connect a ref to our Map component using the useRef hook and then use the useEffect hook to access that ref, find our Map instance, and use it to fly to a new location.

[More details on the Leaflet Map API](https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.6.0.html#map)

Interface with the React Leaflet Map API with the useRef and useEffect React Hooks

In this lesson, you learn how to use the React Leaflet ZoomControl component to add a custom zoom control to your map. We'll walk through removing the default control to avoid duplicates, using the ZoomControl position prop to change its location, and setting custom icons with the zoomInText and zoomOutText props.

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