Book Image

The React Workshop

By : Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot
5 (1)
Book Image

The React Workshop

5 (1)
By: Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot

Overview of this book

Are you interested in how React takes command of the view layer for web and mobile apps and changes the data of large web applications without needing to reload the page? This workshop will help you learn how and show you how to develop and enhance web apps using the features of the React framework with interesting examples and exercises. The workshop starts by demonstrating how to create your first React project. You’ll tap into React’s popular feature JSX to develop templates and use DOM events to make your project interactive. Next, you’ll focus on the lifecycle of the React component and understand how components are created, mounted, unmounted, and destroyed. Later, you’ll create and customize components to understand the data flow in React and how props and state communicate between components. You’ll also use Formik to create forms in React to explore the concept of controlled and uncontrolled components and even play with React Router to navigate between React components. The chapters that follow will help you build an interesting image-search app to fetch data from the outside world and populate the data to the React app. Finally, you’ll understand what ref API is and how it is used to manipulate DOM in an imperative way. By the end of this React book, you’ll have the skills you need to set up and create web apps using React.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Preface

Fetching Data upon Initial Rendering

You may want to display data upon initial rendering of a component; for example, when you visit YouTube, you will see some trending videos on the initial page load. Now, if we want to design a page or a component of this kind, we could use the life cycle methods that we discussed in Chapter 4, React Lifecycle Methods. We need to decide which life cycle method to use to fetch data and store it in a state.

According to the life cycle diagram (https://packt.live/2zCiT7P), the component goes through a life cycle in the following order.

The constructor()-> render()->componentDidMount. componentDidMount() method is used for mounting steps and is the best life cycle method for fetching and manipulating data received from the server. After fetching data in the method, we update the state of the component with the data fetched within the componentDidMount() method in order to populate the data in the content.

From the life cycle methods&apos...