react router this.props.location

There could be a scenario where you may not have access to props.location to pass to the nav component.

Take for example - We had a header component in our project which was included in the routing switch to make it available to all routes.

<Switch>
  <Fragment>
    <Header/>
    <Route path='..' component={...}/>
    <Route path='..' component={...}/>
  </Fragment>
</Switch>

In the above scenario there is no way to pass the location data to the Header component.

A better solution would be to us the withRouter HOC when a component is not being rendered by your router. You will still have access to the router properties history, match and location when you wrap it in the withRouter HOC:

import { withRouter } from 'react-router-dom'
.... 
....
export default withRouter(ThisComponent)

Your navbar component (as you described it in your question) is probably not the route component, right? By route component I mean the one that you use in your react-router configuration that is loaded for a specific route.

this.props.location is accessible only on such route component, so you need to pass it down to your navbar.

Let's take an example:

Your router config:

<Router>
    <Route path="/" component={App}>
    // ...
</Router

Route component App:

class App extends React.Component{
  // ...
  render() {
    return <Navbar location={this.props.location}/>
  }
}

react-router v4

From documentation:

1. <Route> component property should be used, when you have an existing component. <Route> render property takes an inline function, that returns html.

2. A <Route> with no path will always match.

Based on this, we can make a <Route> wrapper to any level of your html structure. It will always be displayed and have access to the location object.

As per your request, if a user comes to /profile page, the <header> will have profile-header class name.

<Router>
    <Route render={({ location }) =>
        <header className={location.pathname.replace(/\//g, '') + '-header'}>
            // header content...
        </header>

        <div id="content"></div>

        <footer></footer>
    } />
</Router>

I couldn't solve it with the solutions given here and here is what worked for me:

I imported history into my component and assigned history.location.pathname to a variable which I later used for dynamic style manipulation.