Making AJAX Requests In React

Overview

Notes on how to use an AJAX request to fill out the state of a React component.

AJAX libraries

It's necessary to use a library to make AJAX calls. These libraries are independent of React. They are installed with NPM.

• Axios
  Apparently Axios is a little more compact than fetch, e.g. with fetch it's necessary to convert AJAX responses to JSON; with Axios that step is automatic. And error handling is supposed to be better with axios.
• superagent
• fetch

Usage

An example of how to make an AJAX call to retrieve JSON data using axios. The data retrieved is a JSON object (or list of objects), not a JSON string.

axios.get("/path/to/content/")
        .then(res => {
            const data = res.data;
        })
        .catch(err => {
            console.log("Something went wrong: " + err);
        });
    return data;