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Ways of Getting Data from API in React

Olena Drugalya on April 05, 2021

This blog post is about the ways of getting data from API in React. Before you read this post, you should be familiar with React library and Appli...
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Steve Griffith

Here is a playlist of videos about React that I made for my students - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTFVg6I2wNI&list=PLyuRouwmQCjm1N4jlJ7b3WWjDA8MjfDbg
Hope it helps you learn faster.

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Steve Griffith

I started posting a new YouTube playlist last week about React in 2021 that includes all the newer features of React.

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Reed Barger

Great article!

If any reader is interested in a more in-depth video guide that covers each of these data-fetching strategies, you can check out my post here: reedbarger.com/fetch-data-in-react

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Leandro Gutierrez • Edited

Great post! I discovered other library very interesting, it's SWR by Vercel :)

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Sean

Is the try catch useful for an async api call? If the promise rejects, the catch will not be triggered.

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zer0

There is actually situations where using axios, “try/catch” & async/await can cause unwanted behaviour.
At least for me it did.
E.g. when using interceptors a failed request might not end up in catch.

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Sean

Nevermind, just read it does actually throw :D

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zer0

What’s a bit missing In this post is:
In the topic index you mention graphQL (6.) but you only mention it as a side note together with react-query-library.
“ways of fetching data” is a bit confusing to me. Axios and fetch-api are library’s for sending requests. Everything else is ways to structure/time sending requests. A bit confusing in my perspective.

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Pavel Ermakov

How to cancel the request once the component is unmounted?

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Olena Drugalya

Why would you need to cancel it? It performed just one time

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Pavel Ermakov

Imagine you are setting state on a successful response. If the component is unmounted before the response is back, you will get an error, something like "Unable to set state on unmounted component"

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Olena Drugalya

In this case you can introduce a variable to track if the component is unmounted or not. If you use functional component, you can write something like this:
useEffect(() => {
let isMounted = true; // track whether component is mounted

request.get(url)
  .then(result => {
    if (isMounted) {
      setState(result);
    }
  });

return () => {
  // clean up
  isMounted = false;
};
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}, []); // only on "didMount"

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Sagnik B

replace "reach" with "rich" on the second paragraph. Nice article 😊

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Jose Luis Rodriguez

Thanks, this post was needed.

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Rospars Quentin

I never thought about making a custom hook for API calls oO I feel kinda stupid now haha
Thanks for that realization!

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Olena Drugalya

You are welcome :)

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johannchopin • Edited

If you need to quickly create a custom REST API for testing the fetch process, I would recommend you to have a look at the restapify library.

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Bret Williams

I love articles that present implementations with clear examples and options like you have.

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Danny Adams

Another nice article! I'd never heard of the fetch-hook before, pretty cool :)

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muzammilaalpha

Nice one!

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The Man

This post is exactly what I needed for my application. Thank you!

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Brian Canzanella

Nice post, thanks!

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Andrew Baisden

Great explanation.

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Olena Drugalya

Thank you!

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Fahad Khan

I have read this blog and enjoyed it a lot but I have a question,
Which way is the best way for fetching data from backend?
I use Axios for this

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Olena Drugalya

There is really no better way :) use what is suitable for your needs. If you ask me, I use Axios just to avoid that extra line of code to transform data to JSON object, but it requires additional import ....most people prefer fetch() because it is already built-in method

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Anas CH

how to fetch fixed number of data from jsonplaceholder, like I want to only fitch 10 element for my page.

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maltin

Fantastic post.

 
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Faiyaz

First learn to why we are using React.Js and learn how create component in React.Js like a Class and functional component in react