Mastering Data Fetching in Advanced Vue Applications

Data Fetching in Routed Components

When dealing with routed components, data fetching can become increasingly complex. You may want to display data while navigating to a particular route, and Vue Router provides options to fetch data before or after navigation.

Feching Data Before Navigation

Vue Router offers several hooks to handle data fetching before navigation, including beforeRouteEnter() and beforeRouteUpdate(). These hooks ensure that data is fetched before the component is loaded, providing a seamless user experience.

export default {
  beforeRouteEnter(to, from, next) {
    // Fetch data here
    next();
  }
}

For example, let’s consider an app with two routed components that display the current and ledger balances of a bank account. We can use the beforeRouteEnter() hook to fetch the data before navigating to the Ledger component.

Feching Data After Navigation

In some cases, you may want to fetch data after navigating to a component, such as when working with real-time data. In this scenario, you can use the created() lifecycle hook to call a data fetching method.

export default {
  created() {
    // Fetch data here
  }
}

To improve the user experience, consider adding a loading component, such as a progress bar or spinner, to indicate that data is being fetched.

The Power of Stale-While-Revalidate

Traditionally, Vue apps used the mounted() hook to fetch data, which can result in multiple API requests and a poor user experience. The stale-while-revalidate concept, made possible through Vue’s composition API, provides a more efficient way of caching already fetched data.

import { ref, onMounted } from 'vue';

export default {
  setup() {
    const data = ref(null);

    onMounted(async () => {
      // Fetch data here
      data.value = await fetchData();
    });

    return {
      data
    };
  }
}

By employing this technique, you can cache data and revalidate it when necessary, ensuring a faster and more seamless user experience.

Optimizing Your Vue App

To take your Vue app to the next level, consider using tools to monitor and track Vue mutations in production. With these tools, you can debug your app like a DVR, recording everything that happens, including network requests, JavaScript errors, and performance problems.

By mastering data fetching and leveraging the stale-while-revalidate technique, you can create a more impressive and efficient user experience in your Vue application.