Implementing a ‘Load More’ Button in a React Application Using React Hooks

Building applications with a seamless user experience in mind is vital in today’s fast-paced web. One way to avoid loading large sets of data at once and making the user wait is by implementing a “Load More” button. This mechanism fetches and displays a limited amount of data initially and then provides more data as the user requests it.

In this article, we’ll build a simple React application that fetches a list of items from an API and utilizes a “Load More” button to display additional items using React hooks.

Prerequisites:

• Basic knowledge of React and React Hooks.
• A development environment setup for React.

Steps to Build the Application:

1. Setting up a New React App Start by creating a new React app using Create React App:

   npx create-react-app react-load-more
   cd react-load-more

2. Fetching Data from an API For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use the JSONPlaceholder API which provides sample posts. Our goal is to fetch posts and display them in our app.
3. Setting Up State with useState and useEffect Hooks Inside your main App component:

   import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

   function App() {
     const [posts, setPosts] = useState([]);
     const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false);
     const [currentPage, setCurrentPage] = useState(1);
     const [postsPerPage] = useState(10);

     useEffect(() => {
       const fetchPosts = async () => {
         setLoading(true);
         const response = await fetch(`https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts?_limit=${postsPerPage}&_page=${currentPage}`);
         const data = await response.json();
         setPosts(prevPosts => [...prevPosts, ...data]);
         setLoading(false);
       };

       fetchPosts();
     }, [currentPage]);

     return (
       // Render posts and "Load More" button here
     );
   }

   export default App;

4. Rendering the Data Continue within the App component:

   //... (rest of your imports and function code)

   return (
     <div className="App">
       <ul>
         {posts.map(post => (
           <li key={post.id}>{post.title}</li>
         ))}
       </ul>
       {loading && <p>Loading...</p>}
       <button onClick={() => setCurrentPage(currentPage + 1)}>Load More</button>
     </div>
   );

   //... (export statement)

5. Styling (Optional) Add some basic styling to make the list look better and distinguish the “Load More” button.

   /* App.css */
   ul {
     list-style: none;
     padding: 0;
   }

   li {
     border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;
     padding: 10px;
   }

   button {
     margin-top: 20px;
     padding: 10px 20px;
   }

Conclusion:

By utilizing React hooks, we’ve built a simple React app that fetches data from an API and displays it incrementally using a “Load More” button. This approach improves the user experience by not overwhelming the user with too much data at once and offers a more performant way of displaying large datasets. As you develop further, consider adding error handling and other UI/UX enhancements to make your application even more robust.