DEV Community

Building custom hooks in React to fetch Data

Shahid Rizwan on September 04, 2021

Fetching data from the backend is one of the crucial parts of the web application. For every application to work dynamically, it fetches the data f...

Read full post

Sonny Brown • Sep 4 '21 • Edited

Good stuff. I like to use a custom hook I made called useStateAndLocalStorage. I love the self documenting nature of custom hooks.

James Morgan • Sep 5 '21

Please I'd like to see how that works. 🤔

Maybe I'll like it too

Rishabh Gupta • Sep 5 '21

Check out my blog on this James.

dev.to/imrishabh18/simplest-custom...

James Morgan • Sep 6 '21

Thanks!

Sonny Brown • Sep 27 '21

That's pretty close to what I made.

Gabriel Markyan • Sep 4 '21

A good thing to note about this is that using custom hooks and hooks inside a useEffect causes an infinite loop.

Eric Haynes • Sep 6 '21 • Edited

That's not any simpler... It's just using the old Promise api...

Hernán Farruggia • Sep 7 '21

I don't see any complexity in any of those... 🤷🏻‍♂️ They just have different sintax, and usually which one to use, will depend on the conventions of your project... Some companies decide to go with async to use latest festures, others prefer to stay with plain old promises... These sre just different points of view...

Eric Haynes • Sep 9 '21 • Edited

Note that the former reply was someone else, so no one "kept using 'old'". It is, in fact, older, but we can refer to it as "the .then syntax".

To each their own, but the allure of async/await is that the code reads exactly the same as it would if it were synchronous. There is a valid argument for consistency. E.g. it's pretty much universally accepted that we don't intermittently use callbacks for async, even if it would save a line or 2.

It's not "way more complex", either. It's slightly more verbose, and only in a rare set of cases. The .then syntax is only cleaner where you can constrain the action to lambda expressions and have at least 4 of them. As soon as you need a block for any of them, IMO it's rather messy. What is simply another line with async/await becomes a new function, another level of nesting, and a new scope. It takes a hit for readability when shorter than 4 as well, since formatters like prettier will inline:

myApi.getOrder(123).then(setOrder).catch(setError);

So yes, in the cases where you have the catch in the same place as the call, can chain 4 or more operations that are all one liners, and never need to refer to something in a prior step of the chain, it's slightly cleaner, but it's rare enough that I wouldn't fault anyone for just forgetting about the syntax altogether.

const fetch1 = (orderNum) => {
  fetch(`/api/orders/${orderNum}`)
    .then((response) => response.json())
    .then(({ products }) => {
      setProducts(products);
      setError(null);
    })
    .catch((error) => {
      logger.error(error);
      setError(error);
    })
    .finally(() => setLoading(false));
};

// vs
const fetch2 = async (orderNum) => {
  try {
    const response = await fetch(`/api/orders/${orderNum}`);
    const { products } = await response.json();

    setProducts(products);
    setError(null);
  } catch (error) {
    logger.error(error);
    setError(error);
  }
  setLoading(false);
};

Shifa Ur Rehman • Jan 21 '23

And Finally!

Marceli-Wac • Sep 7 '21 • Edited

There is also the useCallback hook which can be used to create a memoized function that, when passed to useEffect dependency array, doesn't triger re-renders.

Slimani Mohammed • Sep 5 '21

Thanks for the article. I think it would be better to set the error to null before fetching so that one error in fetching won't stay for all future fetch calls.

Manuel • Sep 7 '21

You should also check:
kent.dev/blog/stop-using-isloading...

Shahid Rizwan • Sep 7 '21

Sure Manuel. Thank you for the article.

Khasky • Feb 26 '23

Updated link: kentcdodds.com/blog/stop-using-isl...

Rahul Gupta • Sep 6 '21

How would you handle different http methods? Here you have 1 hook using only get().

Shahid Rizwan • Sep 6 '21

This hook is specifically for fetching data (GET). You can customize it by passing the HTTP method and body as parameter to the hook and use it inside.

Marceli-Wac • Sep 7 '21

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, can you elaborate?

Gabriel Markyan • Sep 5 '21

Yes, of course. But some linters require all the functions, custom hooks and external data at the dependency array. I'm saying because I've been through this.

Mustafa Zahedi • Oct 22 '22

How fetch again after submitting any form if need in some case?

Juan Carlos Otero Roca • Sep 9 '21

I use axios