Why does my component keep rendering in all routes?

Question

I am attempting to render a component when I enter a url that does not exists. However, the component keeps rendering in all routes. I am using react-router-dom@4.1.1. This are the routes that I set up:

import * as React from "react";
import { Route, RouteComponentProps } from "react-router-dom";
import glamorous from "glamorous";
import ElementList from "./elementlist";
import AddElement from "./addelement";
import NotFound from "./NotFound";

const Styling = glamorous.div({
  minHeight: 5,
  minWidth: 8
});

const NavRouter = () => (
  <Styling>
    <Route path="/" exact={true} component={ElementList} />
    <Route path="/addelement" component={(props: 
       RouteComponentProps<{}>) => (
         <AddElement onSubmitSuccess={() => props.history.push("/")} />
       )} />
    <Route path="*" exact={true} component={NotFound}/>
  </Styling>
);

export default NavRouter;

This is my NotFound component:

import * as React from "react";


const NotFound = () => (
  <h1>The page that you are looking is not there.</h1>
);

export default NotFound;

The issue that I am currently facing is that the message: The page that you are looking is not there. keeps popping up on the / and /addelement route when I changed the URL. I am having a hard time trying to make the message appear only when I go to a route that is not defined. Initially, I tried to switch the routes and make the more "detailed" route at the top like this:

const NavRouter = () => (
  <Styling>
    <Route path="/addelement" component={(props: 
       RouteComponentProps<{}>) => (
         <AddElement onSubmitSuccess={() => props.history.push("/")} />
       )} />
    <Route path="/" exact={true} component={ElementList} />
    <Route path="*" component={NotFound}/>
  </Styling>
);

However, it did not solve the issue. Is there a way to prevent the message from appearing on every route that I go to except for routes that are not defined?

Answer 1

You should use a <Switch> component. Per the documentation:

How is this different than just using a bunch of <Route>s?

<Switch> is unique in that it renders a route exclusively. In contrast, every <Route> that matches the location renders inclusively. Consider this code:

<Route path="/about" component={About}/>
<Route path="/:user" component={User}/>
<Route component={NoMatch}/>

If the URL is /about, then <About>, <User>, and <NoMatch> will all render because they all match the path. This is by design, allowing us to compose <Route>s into our apps in many ways, like sidebars and breadcrumbs, bootstrap tabs, etc.

Occasionally, however, we want to pick only one <Route> to render. If we’re at /about we don’t want to also match /:user (or show our “404” page).

Thus, import it from react-router-dom:

import { Route, RouteComponentProps, Switch } from 'react-router-dom';

Then apply it like so (note there is no need for path="*"):

<Switch>
  <Route path="/" exact={true} component={ElementList} />
  <Route path="/addelement" component={(props: 
     RouteComponentProps<{}>) => (
       <AddElement onSubmitSuccess={() => props.history.push("/")} />
     )} />
  <Route component={NotFound}/>
</Switch>