reactJS adding an event listener to a navbar tile - reactjs

Question

I am running the current version of reactJS with hooks. I have three code modules in my app: header.js which creates a navbar and exports it to app.js which adds some other objects and exports all of this to index.js.
I am trying to add an event listener to the individual tiles in the navbar so that I can redirect to the appropriate page.
code
var listenerElement = document.getElementById("Tile1");
if (listenerElement !== null) {
listenerElement.addEventListener("click", navbarClicked) ;
console.log(listenerElement);
} else {
console.log("Element with ID=Tile1 not found");
}
<div id="Tile1" className="linkcontainer">Home</div>
/code
However, I cannot find an appropriate place to add the event-listener and the element with ID "Tile1" is never found - perhaps because it hasn't been rendered as yet?
The element in question is only rendered by index.js but I can't add a function after the reactDOM.render block in index.js - I get an error "not a react function"
Any suggestions would be much appreciated :-)

Answer 1

For react, you should use "refs" to link to a specific aspect of the navabar.
But as you are just trying to have something affect the navbar, you should use the "onClick" property for the div or iconButton or similar.
for example in a function component:
function handleClick() {
console.log("clicked");}
<nav> <iconButton onClick={handleClick} > button </iconButton> </nav>
https://reactjs.org/docs/handling-events.html

Answer 2

In react, you don't work with the DOM directly. React makes a copy of the DOM called virtual DOM and then compares them to update the DOM. You should add your event listener using props.
So instead of:
document.getElementById("Tile1").addEventListener("click", navbarClicked);
you should do <div onClick={navbarClicked} id="Tile1" className="linkcontainer">Home</div>