How does href in Link work?

[Seybo]

I have a project structure like this:

As you can see my dynamic projects page has name [id].js but my code href="projects/[bar]" and it works. I can even make it href="foo" and it also works. A can click on the link and get to the project's page.

I was thinking that it automatically looks for the same folder as as is pointing to and looks there for any dynamic route page. But then i tried to rename the page folder and set it in href like this but it doesn't work.

And i would expect quite the opposite: the first example to fail and the second to work. So what am i missing here? How does href actually work in Link?

[jamesmosier]

I think what you are seeing when you have an "incorrect" href like href="projects/[bar]" is that since next/link can't find that route it just default to the as value and just navigates to that url like any normal <a href> would do. If you look at your console you'll see a 404 for the prefetch of projects/[bar]. Normally when using next/link with the correct href it would do a client side render but in this case it does a full page refresh because Next can't find that page in the pages folder.