use-api

A simple react hook for loading data from an api with polling support.

Introduction

If you need a simple way to load data quickly this is for you. It allows you to very easily request data from any endpoint and have it available in your React application.

You can optionally specify a polling interval and manually trigger a refresh. It also gracefully cancels any open requests if you decide to change the URL and restarts timers if the polling interval changes.

const { data, loading, error, refresh } = useApi({
  url: "https://some-api.com/api",
  pollInterval: 10000,
  payload: { keywords: "hello" },
  method: "post",
  changed: (data) => console.log("The data changed!", data),
});

Installation

Install this package with npm.

npm i @signal-noise/use-api

Usage

Here is an example of a GET api call to retrieve a list of people which polls every 10 seconds, with a manual refresh button.

import React from 'react';
import useApi from '@signal-noise/use-api';
import PeopleList from './PeopleList';

const PeopleList = () = {
  const { data, loading, error, refresh } = useApi({
    url: "https://some-api.com",
    pollInterval: 10000
  });

  const people = data.people || [];

  return (
    <>
      {loading && <p>Loading...</p>}
      {error && <p>{error}</p>}
      <button onClick={refresh} disabled={loading}>Refresh</button>
      <PeopleList people={people} />
    </>
  );
}

You can optionally pass in data and specify the request type. Below is a minimal example of a user search UI. (You may wish to debounce the user input 🤷‍)

import React, { useState } from 'react';
import useApi from '@signal-noise/use-api';
import PeopleList from './PeopleList';

const PeopleSearch = () = {
  const [keywords, setKeywords] = useState("kazumi");

  const { data } = useApi({
    url: "https://some-api.com",
    payload: { keywords },
    method: "post"
  });

  const people = data.people || [];

  return (
    <>
      <input value={keywords} onChange={e=>setKeywords(e.target.value)} />
      <PeopleList people={data.people} />
    </>
  );
}

API

Input

• url : Required - A URL to request data from.
• pollInterval : Optional - How often to re-request updated data. Pass 0 to disable polling (the default behaviour).
• payload : Optional - A data object to send with the request. If we are performing a GET request, it is appended into the querystring (e.g. ?keywords=hello). If it is a POST request it is sent in the request body as JSON.
• headers : Optional - A data object containing http headers to send with the request. This must be a simple object with key value pairs like { authorization: "Bearer abc" }.
• method : Optional - Set the request type, either get or post. (defaults to get)
• changed : Optional - A function that is called if the data actually changed during the request. If this is specified, use-api does extra checking and compares old and new data. If data does not change, new data is not propagated and a redraw is saved. Please note, this may have performance repercussions if the data is large as it performs a deep comparison between new and old data to determine if they are equivalent.

Output

• data: The data returned from the API.
• loading: A boolean signifying if the data is currently being loaded.
• error: A string representation of an error if it occurred during loading.
• refresh: A function to call to re-request the data.

Note that a developer error, for example passing garbage as the method, will throw an exception. An issue within the API request itself will set an error within the response.