Efficiently Filtering API Data in React: A Step-by-Step Guide to Rendering Items on Button Click

Discover how to filter API data and display movie cards based on user interaction in your React app. Learn a more elegant approach to state management with simple code examples.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/72285958/ asked by the user 'ReturnMack' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/19143190/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/72286081/ provided by the user 'Hans Murangaza DRCongo' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/13490165/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Efficiently Filtering API Data in React: A Step-by-Step Guide to Rendering Items on Button Click

In web development, fetching data from APIs is a common practice. Whether you are working on a movie database or a product display, rendering items based on specific criteria can enhance user experience. Today, we will dive into a problem many developers face: how to efficiently filter API data and render items upon a button click using React.

The Scenario

Suppose you fetch data from an API that returns an array of objects representing movies:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Your goal is to:

Render all movies as cards when the application initially loads.

Implement a button that, when clicked, filters the displayed movies to show only those aired before the year 2013.

Here's where our challenge lies: achieving this functionality in a simple and elegant way without unnecessary complexity.

The Initial Approach

Your basic implementation may look something like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Challenges with the Initial Approach:

The toggling logic is produced by a ternary operator, resulting in confusion when switching between full and filtered lists.

The state does not revert to show all movies upon subsequent button clicks, leading to a frustrating experience for users.

The Improved Solution

To resolve these issues and enhance the toggle functionality, we can manage our state more effectively by using a backup of the original data. Here’s an improved version of the above implementation.

Step 1: Establish Additional State

Begin by adding an additional state for storing the original movie list:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 2: Update the Data Fetch Logic

When fetching the movie data, populate both the movies and moviesBackup states:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 3: Adjust the Toggle Functionality

Revamp the handleToggle function to switch between the full list and the filtered list:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

The Complete Code

Here’s what the complete improved code looks like with these adjustments:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Conclusion

By managing your state wisely and implementing a backup for your original data, you can create a seamless and intuitive user experience in your React applications. This approach allows for clean toggling between different filtered views without cluttering the logic with complex conditions.

Now it’s your turn! Try implementing this in your own application and observe how effortlessly you can manage API data rendering based on user interaction.