Unlock the Power of Refine: Building a Dynamic Web Application

Why Refine Matters

In the world of frontend technology, learning multiple frameworks can be both entertaining and a smart career move. It’s a great way to future-proof your skills and stay ahead of the curve. Refine, a React-based framework, is a game-changer in the industry. With its built-in features, Refine makes developing data-heavy apps a breeze.

What is Refine?

Refine is a React-based framework designed for building data-heavy applications quickly. It leverages the Ant Design system, a business-oriented user interface toolkit. Refine comes with a plethora of prebuilt functionality, including:

• Routing
• Networking
• Authentication
• State management
• Internationalization

Its superpower lies in its complete control over the user interface, making it perfect for applications that require processing large volumes of data, such as admin panels and dashboards.

Getting Started with Refine

To get started with Refine, you’ll need:

• React v16 or newer
• Working knowledge of React
• Working knowledge of Node.js
• A text editor

The Power of Refine Hooks

Refine’s Hooks are a standout feature that makes integration with web applications seamless. They offer additional functionalities beyond native React Hooks. The data hooks, including:

• useCreate
• useUpdate
• useDelete
• useCustom
• useApiUrl

are some of the extra features offered by Refine. We’ll focus on authorization hooks in this article, as we’ll be implementing them later in our sample app.

Authorization Hooks

Refine’s authorization hooks aid in web application authentication. They grant developers superpowers such as:

• Authenticating users
• Logging out
• Validating if an existing user meets certain criteria before accessing protected routes

Building a Simple Web Application with Refine

Let’s build a simple application that lists users. We’ll generate a default template for Refine using Create React App. Then, we’ll create a pages folder, component folder, and queries folder inside the src folder. These folders will aid in the separation of concerns, resulting in good code organization.

npx create-react-app my-refine-app
cd my-refine-app
mkdir src/pages src/components src/queries

Retrieving Data for the App

We’ll use a fake REST API to retrieve some useful information. We’ll create a file called GetData.jsx within the queries folder. This file will contain the routerProvider, dataProvider, resources, and Layout properties.

import { useDataProvider } from '@refine/core';

const GetData = () => {
  const dataProvider = useDataProvider();

  const { data, isLoading } = dataProvider.getList({
    resource: 'users',
  });

  return (

  );
};

export default GetData;

Creating a Dynamic Login Page

We’ll add some spice to our application by creating a dynamic login page that prevents users from accessing the list of users until they have been authenticated. We’ll use third-party libraries such as Google Authenticator, Axios, and dotenv.

import axios from 'axios';
import { useAuth } from '@refine/auth';

const LoginPage = () => {
  const { login } = useAuth();

  const handleSubmit = async (event) => {
    event.preventDefault();
    const username = event.target.username.value;
    const password = event.target.password.value;

    try {
      const response = await axios.post('/login', { username, password });
      login(response.data);
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
    }
  };

  return (

  );
};

export default LoginPage;

By the end of this article, you should have a good understanding of how Refine works, why it’s significant in web applications, and how to set up a basic Refine web application. This is a simple project with a variety of features. You can explore the code on GitHub or see the live view for more practice. Happy coding!