How To Make Better Queries With React Query

A guide for using React Query in your projects

Source: Patrick Federi On Unsplash

In this article we will learn the following:

• When to use React Query
• Simple fetch requests with the React Query package
• Searching items from an API through an ID
• Pagination
• Mutations

When To Use React Query

The traditional fetch() method is great for extracting data from an API, but you might face a handful of difficulties if your application grows and becomes more complex. For example,

• Caching: To save query responses into the cache, the developer needs to deal with cache headers and browser caching. This is a major headache. Later on, you will also need to tell React when to re-fetch the data, that is, tell React that the data is out of date and needs to be updated.
• Pagination: What if you need to display massive amounts of data to the user? In this case, you will need to implement pagination support. Sure, while pagination is possible, bringing in such a feature is another hassle.

This is where the React Query package comes in. This library handles the caching for you. There is no need to work with cache headers and browser caching. Furthermore, it makes pagination easier as well.

To summarize, React Query alleviates many headaches by removing many difficulties associated with fetching data and managing server state.

Now that we have talked about its benefits, it’s time to code!

React Query: The Basics

In this portion of the article, we will learn:

• Simple API calls
• Searching with the ID

Project setup

We need to initialize the repository. To do so, run the following terminal command:

In this project, we will be using the following external libraries:

• react-query: This will be used to make fetch and post requests to the API.
• Formik: This will be used to create a text form that will allow the user to…