Qwik City - Layout

When implementing routes, different routes usually share a common header, footer, and menu system. We call the common parts a layout.

The developer could extract all of these into <Header>, <Footer>, and <Menu> components and manually build up each page's wrapping components, but that is repetitive and error-prone. Instead, we can use layouts to automatically reuse common parts.

Example

Let's say we would like our site to look like this:

+---------------------------------------------------+
| Header                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------+
| Menu    | <ROUTE_SPECIFIC_CONTENT>                |
| - home  |                                         |
| - about |                                         |
|         |                                         |
+---------------------------------------------------+
| Footer                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------+

We can define the above with these files.

- src/
  - components/
    - header.tsx     # Header component implementation
    - footer.tsx     # Footer component implementation
    - menu.tsx       # Menu component implementation
  - routes/
    - layout.tsx     # Layout implementation using: <Header>, <Footer>, and <Menu>
    - about.tsx      # https://example.com/about
    - index.tsx      # https://example.com/

Component implementations

// File: src/components/header.tsx
export default component$(() => {
  return <>Header</>;
});

// File: src/components/footer.tsx
export default component$(() => {
  return <>Footer</>;
});

// File: src/components/menu.tsx
export default component$(() => {
  return (
    <ul>
      <li>home</li>
      <li>about</li>
    </ul>
  );
});

// File: src/routes/layout.tsx
export default component$(() => {
  return (
    <>
      <Header />
      <Menu />
      <Slot />{/* <== This is where the route will be inserted */}
      <Footer />
    </>
  );
});

// File: src/routes/index.tsx
export default component$(() => {
  return <>Home</>;
});

// File: src/routes/about/index.tsx
export default component$(() => {
  return <>About</>;
});