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"useSWR" - React Hooks for Remote Data Fetching

Sung M. Kim on October 29, 2019

Image by analogicus from Pixabay Zeit has released a React hook, useSWR, which has a tag-line, "React Hooks for Remote Data Fetching". SWR stands...
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Nick Taylor

Thanks sharing Sung. Gonna take a look at this when I get a chance. Between this and restful-react, all kinds of great stuff out there right now.

GitHub logo contiamo / restful-react

A consistent, declarative way of interacting with RESTful backends, featuring code-generation from Swagger and OpenAPI specs 🔥

restful-react

Building React apps that interact with a RESTful API presents a set of questions, challenges and potential gotchas. This project aims to remove such pitfalls, and provide a pleasant developer experience when crafting such applications. It can be considered a thin wrapper around the fetch API in the form of React components and hooks.

As an abstraction, this tool allows for greater consistency and maintainability of dynamic codebases.

Overview

At its core, restful-react exposes a hook, called useGet. This component retrieves data, either on mount…

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Sung M. Kim

You're welcome, Nick and thanks for sharing restful-react.

There are many good libraries out there still yet undiscovered and we don't know about :)

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Rohan Sawant

You Go Sung! 🔥

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Sung M. Kim

Thanks Rohan. Glad to see ya on DEV :)

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Joe Zack

I'm a total React noob, but I would normally do this with useEffect. Is the main benefit the support for suspense?

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Joe Zack

Ah, I think I see after playing with your example. It's nice to have it remote/local friendly out of the box. Thanks!

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Sung M. Kim

As I am also a noob at useSWR, I just tried to explain as much as I know :p

I would normally do this with useEffect

Yes. One would normally use useEffect by default to fetch data (as it's a side effect).

useSWR would ease the burden of having to write much boilterplate code.

useSWR is using useLayoutEffect over useEffect (, which I'd like to know the reason behind it).

github.com/zeit/swr/blob/a323fa702...

thinking out loudly:

Maybe this article by Dave Ceddia would provide an answer.

When to useLayoutEffect Instead of useEffect

Is the main benefit the support for suspense?

It's only one of the nice features :)

The main benefit is hidden in the name, SWR

SWR first returns the data from cache (stale), then sends the fetch request (revalidate), and finally comes with the up-to-date data again.

Basically not showing "loading" screen as soon as a data is being fetched/refetched.

That sounds a bit like Pending → Skeleton → Complete Concurrent UI pattern in the experimental channel (but not sure if they are the same).

You can also do optimisitic UI update using mutate, meaning, you can show updated state right away before getting remote data. And revert if the change was not made.

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Roel John Bobis

This is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

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Sung M. Kim

Thanks, Roel~

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Nguyễn Trọng Vĩnh

useAsync, useAsyncRetry and useAsyncFn is better!

Change my mind!

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Sung M. Kim • Edited

No, I won't change your mind 🙂

On the other hand, as this post touched good parts of useSWR, I will share a nice/thorough concerns (by Sébastien Lorber) one should watch out for.

Sébastien is an author of github.com/slorber/react-async-hook, which is in works to be merged with React-Async.

reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dof4...

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keiji009

I 'd like to ask how to useSRW get request from graphql service.