What is React-Query ?

from the React-Query website we can find this explanation

React Query is often described as the missing data-fetching library for React,
but in more technical terms, it makes fetching, caching, synchronizing and updating
server state in your React applications a breeze.

so basically react-query is a library that provides us by default with most of the functionalities that we would need to use
while fetching data from the server, things like caching, re-fetching automatically and synchronizing the fetched data across the app

I will demonstrate the benefits of this library by building a simple todo application that fetches and updates data on the server,
I will also provide code examples to showcase the difference between using react-query and not using it!

Todo App

First let's start by installing react-query in our react app, to do that we'll run

yarn add react-query

or

 npm install react-query

To setup react-query we'll have to wrap our App component with a Query provider just like so:

import {
  QueryClient,
  QueryClientProvider,
} from "react-query";

const queryClient = new QueryClient();


ReactDOM.render(
  <React.StrictMode>
    <QueryClientProvider client={queryClient}>
      <App />
    </QueryClientProvider>
  </React.StrictMode>,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

this will allow us to use the query client in all the child components of the App component which pretty much is our whole app

so let's try fetching our todos, we'll do so in two methods one with react-query and one without react-query

1. without react-query

const [data,setData] = useState([]); //state to hold our fetched data

useEffect(()=>{
    fetchTodos();
})

const fetchTodos = async () => {
   const todos = await getTodos(); //getTodos is an asynchronous function I created that fetches the todos for us and returns a promise
   setData(todos); // setting the data in the state
}

return (
    <div className="App">
      <header>
        <h1>Todos</h1>
      </header>
      <AddTodo />
      {data.map((todo) => (
        <Todo key={todo.id} text={todo.text} isDone={todo.is_done} id={todo.id} /> //component that presents the todos will get into it later
      ))}
    </div>
  );

that's the traditional basic way of doing it, you fetch the data update the state with the fetched data and to do that we use hooks
such as useState and useEffect

2. with react-query

import { useQuery } from "react-query";

import Todo from "./components/Todo";
import AddTodo from "./components/AddTodo";

import { getTodos } from "./apis";

function App() {
  const { isLoading, isError, data, error } = useQuery("todos", getTodos); // a hook provided by react-query, it takes a key(name) and function that returns a promise

  if (isLoading)
    return (
      <div className="App">
        <h1>isLoading...</h1>
      </div>
    );

  if (isError)
    return (
      <div className="App">
        <h1>{error}</h1>
      </div>
    );

  return (
    <div className="App">
      <header>
        <h1>Todos</h1>
      </header>
      <AddTodo />
      {data.map((todo) => (
        <Todo key={todo.id} text={todo.text} isDone={todo.is_done} id={todo.id} />
      ))}
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

Here I used the useQuery hook, it takes a unique key as q first paremeter (you can name it whatever you want)
and an asynchronous function as the second paremeter in this case it's a function that fetches the todos from the server.

what's interesting here is what useQuery returns, it returns an object that contains the life cycle of fetching data, it returns a booledan isLoading
which is true incase the the fetching process is still on going, it also gives a an isError boolean which is true incase an error occurs, and also it returns
data which contains the data returned from the server and error incase an error occurs.

no useState, no useEffect, and most importantly it handles all the cases (loading, error and success),
and also it caches the data so it doesn't re-fetch if the data was just recently fetched

updating server data is one of the main points where react-query shines, it almost gives the illusion of being realtime,
so let's see how we can add todos to our list

import { useState } from "react";

import { useMutation, useQueryClient } from "react-query";

import { addTodo } from "../apis";

export default function AddTodo() {
  const [todo, setTodo] = useState("");

  const queryClient = useQueryClient();

  const mutation = useMutation(addTodo, {
    onSuccess: () => {
      // Invalidate and refetch
      setTodo("")
      queryClient.invalidateQueries("todos");
    },
  });

  return (
    <div>
      <input
        value={todo}
        onChange={(event) => {
          setTodo(event.target.value);
        }}
        type="text"
      />
      <button
        onClick={() => {
          mutation.mutate(todo);
        }}
      >
        Add
      </button>
    </div>
  );
}

using the useQueryClient and useMutation hooks we can update our data on the server and re-fetch if the update was successful,
as you can see useMutation return a mutation object that has a mutate method, the mutate method takes the parameters that addTodo function needs,
we can also pass on an onSuccess method which allows us in this case to tell the query client to re-fetch the todos so the update happens immediately.

Conclusion

React-Query is a great library for fetching data, it gives us the tools necessary so that we can avoid all the repetitive tasks that we would otherwise have to do
ourselves to achieve the same result.

I only touched breifly as an introduction to react-query but there is a lot more to explore in the library, so I urge you to go check it out and explore all the other functionalities
that I didn't explain.

As for the todo app, I have it completed with more functionalities like checking the todo and deleting todos on my github repo, so go check it out as well ===> laughing-computing-machine
(I know! I like to use weird names for my repos 😉 )