Rendering react component after api response

Question

I have a react component that I wish to populate with images using the Dropbox api. The api part works fine, but the component is rendered before the data comes through & so the array is empty. How can I delay the rendering of the component until it has the data it needs?

var fileList = [];
var images = [];
var imageSource = [];

class Foo extends React.Component {

 render(){
  dbx.filesListFolder({path: ''})
  .then(function(response) {
   fileList=response.entries;
   for(var i=0; i<fileList.length; i++){
    imageSource.push(fileList[0].path_lower);
   }
   console.log(imageSource);
   })

  for(var a=0; a<imageSource.length; a++){
   images.push(<img key={a} className='images'/>);
  }

  return (
   <div className="folioWrapper">
    {images}
   </div>
  );
 }
}

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Changes:

1. Don't do the api call inside render method, use componentDidMount lifecycle method for that.

componentDidMount:

componentDidMount() is invoked immediately after a component is mounted. Initialization that requires DOM nodes should go here. If you need to load data from a remote endpoint, this is a good place to instantiate the network request. Setting state in this method will trigger a re-rendering.

2. Define the imageSource variable in state array with initial value [], once you get the response update that using setState, it will automatically re-render the component with updated data.

3. Use the state array to generate the ui components in render method.

4. To hold the rendering until you didn't get the data, put the condition inside render method check the length of imageSource array if length is zero then return null.

Write it like this:

class Foo extends React.Component {

    constructor(){
        super();
        this.state = {
            imageSource: []
        }
    }

    componentDidMount(){
        dbx.filesListFolder({path: ''})
          .then((response) => {
              let fileList = response.entries;
              this.setState({
                  imageSource: fileList
              });
          })
    }

    render(){
        if(!this.state.imageSource.length)
            return null;

        let images = this.state.imageSource.map((el, i) => (
            <img key={i} className='images' src={el.path_lower} />
        ))

        return (
            <div className="folioWrapper">
                {images}
            </div>
        );
    }
}