I am migrating an existing react app over from using director to using react-router . While I'm loving it so far, maintaining history without re rendering an entire page was easy with director, and I'm not sure whether this is possible with react-router .

What I would like to do is have a view, let's call it Slides and two other nested view components let's call them One and Two .

In the router, these components would map to /slides , slides/one and slides/two .

Slides contains various layout components like Header , Nav and Footer . These are basically static.

Now, there is a transitional animation that will play when navigating between the slides. With my previous router, I was able to achieve this without having to render Slides and all its sub components again. After reading https://github.com/reactjs/react-router/issues/266 and https://github.com/reactjs/react-router/issues/3691 I figured that this may not be possible.

Is the accepted way to do this via CSSTransitionsGroup and just accept the re renders? It would be not so good for the UI if the render was slow and those static components blinked in and out or something.

Any advice would be appreciated!