After yesterday's shenanigans with ES6 fetch(), I made a tiny library called better-fetch which makes your life easier. Or at least it makes my life easier.

Without changing the API, better-fetch automatically includes cookies, which would have saved me a very frustrating amount of time yesterday, lets you add default headers, and you can pass request body as a plain JS object. None of that FormData nonsense.

better-fetch works the same as fetch() , but is less cumbersome to use.

You install with npm. Or whatever you use to install packages from npmjs.org. Yarn maybe?

$ npm install --save better-fetch

Then you set up headers that every one of your fetch() calls needs. My backend requires an Authorization and an Accept header from all calls.

import fetch from "better-fetch" ; fetch . setDefaultHeaders ( { Authorization : ` Token token= ${ GlobalTokenValue } ` , Accept : "application/json.v2" , } ) ;

You can then use better-fetch anywhere in your code as you normally would with fetch() . The API feels the same and promises to work just like you'd expect.

import fetch from "better-fetch" ; fetch ( "/api/some/thing" ) . then ( ( response ) => response . json ( ) ) . then ( ( json ) => { } ) ;

This code fetches JSON document with a GET request to the /api/some/thing URL. Any default headers are set in the request and cookies are sent as well.

POST-ing is also made less cumbersome:

import fetch from "better-fetch" ; const data = { key : "value" , key2 : "value2" , } ; fetch ( "/api/save_response" , { method : "POST" , body : data } ) . then ( ( response ) => response . json ( ) ) . then ( ( json ) => { console . log ( json ) ; } ) ;

A dictionary body is automatically transformed into a FormData object, and strings and FormData objects are let through. This gives you flexibility to work with any API backend, but it still makes your life easier.

Similarly, you can specify headers as either a Headers object or a dictionary – better-fetch has you covered.

Happy hacking ?

PS: I know a bunch of fetch wrappers exist already. They all make significant changes to the API, and I wanted to avoid that.

Did you enjoy this article? 👎 👍

Published on November 2nd, 2016 in Front End, react, Technical

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