Data fetching

Intro to Data Fetching

Most applications require some level of data fetching from a server. The code required to perform this data fetching can be as simple as a fetch request:

const response = await fetch('https://api.example.com/data')
const data = await response.json()

That's simple enough, but no matter how fast your server is, you need to think about what the user's looking at while they wait. You don't get to control the user's network connection. For a similar reason you also need to think about what happens if the request fails. You can't control the user's connection relability either.

React has a nice way to manage both of these declaratively in components using Suspense and ErrorBoundary.

The biggest trick is how to trigger these two things to happen when rendering the UI. This is where the use hook comes in:

function PhoneDetails() {
	const details = use(phoneDetailsPromise)
	// now you have the details
}

What's important for you to understand here is that the use hook is passed a promise. It's not where you create a promise. You need to have triggered the fetch request somewhere else and then pass it along to the use hook. Otherwise every time your component renders you'll trigger the fetch request again. However, there are ways around this which we'll explore later on.

The real trick though is how the heck does use turn a promise into a resolved value without using await!? We need to make sure the code does not continue if the use hook can't return the resolved details. So how does it manage to do this? The answer is actually simpler than you might think.

Let me ask you some JavaScript trivia... How do you synchronously stop a function from running to completion? You throw something! So that's exactly what the use hook does. It adds a .then onto the promise so it can store the resolved value, and then it throws the promise. When the promise resolves, React will re-render your component and this time the use hook will have the resolved value to return!

This is kind of hilarious, but it works great. The implementation details of the use hook are a bit more complex and they definitely can change, but we'll implement a simplified version of it in this exercise.

To complete the declarative circle, when the promise is thrown, React will "suspend" the component which means it will look up the tree of parent components for a Suspense component and render its boundary:

import { Suspense } from 'react'

function App() {
	return (
		<Suspense fallback={<div>loading phone details</div>}>
			<PhoneDetails />
		</Suspense>
	)
}

This works similar to Error Boundaries in that the suspense boundary can handle any thrown promises in its children or grandchildren. Also they can be nested so you have a great amount of control over the loading state of your application.

If the promise rejects, then your ErrorBoundary will be triggered and you can render an error message to the user:

import { Suspense } from 'react'
import { ErrorBoundary } from 'react-error-boundary'

function App() {
	return (
		<ErrorBoundary fallback={<div>Oh no, something bad happened</div>}>
			<Suspense fallback={<div>loading phone details</div>}>
				<PhoneDetails />
			</Suspense>
		</ErrorBoundary>
	)
}

In this exercise, we're going to build a simplified use hook from scratch.