react-promisify

React data fetching made simple.

This project is a simple Higher Order Component wrapper around Promises in React. It allows you to define your API calls, initiate data fetching and consume results in elegant and clean way. State managing is done for you under the hood.

Table of Contents

• Demo
• Installation
• Getting started
• Advanced usage
  • Using middlewares
  • Updating response data
  • Transforming server response
  • Error handling
  • Canceling requests
  • Lazy loading pagination
  • Resetting state
  • Caching
  • Combining with Context api
• API reference
• Examples
  • Real world

Demo

The simplest way to start playing around with react-promisify is with this CodeSandbox snippet:
https://codesandbox.io/

It covers basic Promise request definition and data fetching emitting.

Installation

Install it with yarn:

yarn add react-promisify

Or with npm:

npm install react-promisify --save

Getting started

Your component needs to be decorated by withPromise HOC in order to be able fetch the data and have an access to it. It accepts the name of the prop, containing response state as the first argument and a function, which returns Promise as a second.

Once you call this.props.movies.fetch(), your Promise function will be envoked and updated state variables will be passed into the component. Parameters, passed to fetch() method, will be automatically provided to your custom Promise function.

When request is in progress and not finished yet - isFetching variable will be equal to true. After request will be fetched, you'll get the response in data variable and timestamp of the request as lastUpdated value.

⚠️ Note, that it's not safe to rely only on isFetching variable when displaying loading indicators. On the first render, you will have isFetching:false, because data fetching starts after your component mounts. Additionally, you should check that lastUpdated variable is falsy, which is guaranteed when you render your component first time.

  import { withPromise } from 'react-promisify';
 
  class Movies extends React.Component {
    componentDidMount() {
      this.props.movies.fetch("comedy")
    }
 
    render() {
      const { isFetching, lastUpdated, data } = this.props.movies;
 
      return isFetching || !lastUpdated ? (
        <div>Loading...</div>
      ) : (
        <div>
          {data.map(movie => <div key={movie.id}>{movie.title}</div>)}
        </div>
      );
    }
  }
 
  const fetchMovies = (category) =>
    fetch(`http://your-amazing-api.com/movies/${category}`)
      .then(res => res.json())
 
  const DecoratedMovies = withPromise("movies", fetchMovies)(Movies);

Advanced usage

Using middlewares

Middlewares are useful when you need to hook up into the request/response lifecycle, make some actions before or after the response finished.

Basic middleware function is having the following signature:

(next) => (...args) => {}

It accepts next Promise function in the middleware chain as an input and returns new Promise function, which will be passed to the next middleware. Returned function, will take the same arguments as your initial data fetching call.

The simple logger middleware will look as the following:

const logger = (next) => (...args) => {
  console.log("Request was started with these arguments:", args);
  return next(...args).then(res => {
    console.log("Request was finished with:", res);
    return err;
  }).catch(err => {
    console.log("Request was failed with:", err);
    throw err;
  });
}

It could be applied by returning it from the function, passed at the 3rd argument of the HOC:

withPromise("movies", fetchMovies, props => logger);

Out of the box, the library is coming with onSuccess, onFailure and provideRequest middlewares.

Refer to the API reference for detailed information regarding each one.

import { compose } from 'ramda';
 
export default withPromise("movies", fetchMovies, props => compose(
  provideRequest(() => [props.userId]),
  onSuccess(() => {
    console.log("Request was succeded");
  }),
  onFailure(() => {
    console.log("Request was failed");
  })
))(Movies);

In the example above, compose function from Ramda is used for combining multiple middlewares into a single one.

Updating response data

Most likely, in a complex cases you will need to update fetched data state in response to some actions in future. For example, when new movie is created, you will want to update its list. For that case, .update() method of the provided request prop should be used:

import { compose } from 'ramda';
 
export default compose(
  withPromise("fetchMovies", fetchMovies),
  withPromise("createMovie", createMovie, props => onSuccess(movie => {
    props.update(movies => [...movies, movie]);
  }))
)(Movies);

compose function, from that example serves the same purpose - composing multiple HOC's into a new one.

Error handling

Roadmap

• Default value support