Simplifying Data Loading in React with Suspense
Managing data loading in frontend applications can become increasingly complex over time. To address this issue, the React core team has introduced a set of concurrent features, including Suspense, to simplify data fetching in React applications.
What is React Suspense?
Suspense is a feature that allows components to communicate to React that they are waiting for some data. It’s not a data fetching library like react-async, nor is it a state management solution like Redux. Instead, Suspense enables components to render a fallback declaratively while waiting for an asynchronous operation to complete.
How to Use Suspense
To use Suspense, you need to wrap your component in a Suspense component and provide a fallback property. The fallback property is rendered while the component is waiting for data.
Common Data Fetching Patterns
There are two common data fetching patterns in React: fetch-on-render and fetch-then-render. However, these patterns have limitations, such as leading to network waterfall problems. Suspense offers a better approach, known as render-as-you-fetch, which allows components to begin rendering immediately after triggering a network request.
Building a Sample App with React Suspense
To demonstrate the power of Suspense, let’s build a simple app that fetches data from an API and renders it to the DOM. We’ll create a project structure, install the required dependencies, and write code for our API folder, components, and error handling.
Structuring the API Folder
Our API folder will contain two files: wrapPromise.js and fetchData.js. The wrapPromise.js file is a wrapper that communicates with Suspense, while the fetchData.js file fetches data from an actual URL endpoint.
Building Our App Components
We’ll create several components, including App.jsx, UserWelcome.jsx, and Todos.jsx. Each component will be wrapped in a Suspense component, which will handle the loading state.
Managing Rendering Order with Suspense
To manage rendering order, we can nest Suspense components or use SuspenseList with a “reveal order” to specify the order in which components should render.
Handling Errors in Suspense
We can use Error Boundary to handle errors in Suspense. This API helps catch errors within the Suspense tree without affecting the rest of the React DOM nodes.
Finishing Our App
After building our components and handling errors, we can run our app and see how Suspense simplifies data fetching and improves the user experience.
By leveraging Suspense, we can create more reactive and maintainable code, resulting in better UX and performance.