Putting it All Together: React Fetch CRUD Lab

Learning Goals

  • Use the useEffect hook to fetch data from an API
  • Use event handlers with fetch to send data to an API
  • Update state after receiving data from an API

Introduction

We're going to continue working on our quiz app, this time from the administrative side of things! We want our quizmasters to be able to view, add, edit, and delete the existing quizzes so they can change the content for the rest of our users.

There's some starter code set up, so you won't need to create any new components for this lab. Your goal will be to work with fetch and interact with our quiz API to perform the necessary CRUD operations to complete these deliverables.

Setup

As usual, make sure to run npm install to install the necessary dependencies.

For this lab, we'll be using json-server to create a RESTful API with our quiz data. You can run json-server by running npm run server (the command for this is in the package.json file). Once your server is running, go to http://localhost:4000/questions in your browser and have a look at the question data.

Then, in a new terminal tab, run npm start to run the React application.

Deliverables

GET /questions

When the application loads, get all the questions from http://localhost:4000/questions and display them using the QuestionList component.

You'll need to add useState and useEffect for this deliverable, but it's up to you to decide where it belongs! Think about which components will need access to the question data.

POST /questions

When the user clicks the 'New Question' button, a form will be displayed for creating a new question. This form is already set up as a controlled form, so your responsibility will be to send this form data to our API when the form is submitted.

For the API to work, you'll need to format your POST request like this:

POST /questions

Required Headers:
{ "Content-Type": "application/json" }

Body:
{
  "prompt": string,
  "answers": array of strings,
  "correctIndex": integer
}

In addition to updating the form, you should display the new question in the QuestionList component by updating state.

NOTE: because json-server doesn't have any validations, if you make any mistakes and send the body of your request in the wrong format, you'll need to manually delete the entry from the db.json file.

DELETE /questions/:id

When the user clicks the 'View Questions' button, a list of all the questions should show up (from deliverable 1). When the delete button is clicked, the question should be removed from the list by updating state. It should also be deleted on the server.

Make sure to include the id of the question you're trying to delete in your request's url!

PATCH /questions/:id

When the user clicks the 'View Questions' button, a list of all the questions should show up (from deliverable 1). When the dropdown for the correct answer is changed, the question should be updated on the server. It should also be updated in state.

For the API to work, you'll need to format your PATCH request like this:

PATCH /questions/:id

Required Headers:
{ "Content-Type": "application/json" }

Body:
{
  "correctIndex": integer
}

Make sure to include the id of the question you're trying to update in your request's url!

Resources