La creación de aplicaciones web con API dinámicas y la representación del lado del servidor es una forma de brindar a las personas una gran experiencia tanto con el contenido como con la velocidad. ¿Cómo podemos usar Next.js para crear fácilmente esas aplicaciones?

• ¿Qué vamos a construir?
• ¿Qué es Next.js?
• Paso 0: configurar una nueva aplicación Next.js
• Paso 1: obtener personajes de Rick y Morty con una API en Next.js
• Paso 2: mostrar los personajes de Rick y Morty en la página
• Paso 3: cargando más personajes de Rick y Morty
• Paso 4: agregar la capacidad de buscar personajes de Rick y Morty
• Paso 5: uso de rutas dinámicas para vincular a las páginas de personajes de Rick y Morty
• Paso adicional: ¡Implemente su wiki de Rick and Morty en Vercel!

¿Qué vamos a construir?

Nos divertiremos un poco y crearemos una aplicación web que sirva como una wiki básica para los personajes de Rick y Morty.

Nuestra aplicación constará de algunas cosas:

• Una lista de personajes en la portada
• Un botón que puede cargar más caracteres, ya que la API está paginada
• Un cuadro de búsqueda para buscar personajes.
• Una página de personaje con detalles básicos.

Aprenderemos algunos conceptos como:

• Cómo activar una aplicación web con Next.js
• Cómo obtener y utilizar datos de una API
• Cómo pre-renderizar datos desde una API
• Cómo configurar el enrutamiento dinámico

¿Qué es Next.js?

Next.js es un marco de React de Vercel. Le permite crear fácilmente aplicaciones web dinámicas y ligeras con un montón de funciones modernas que esperaría listas para usar.

Vercel, la empresa que admite Next.js, es un servicio que le permite automatizar las canalizaciones de desarrollo continuo para implementar fácilmente aplicaciones web en el mundo. También usaremos la herramienta de línea de comandos de Vercel para implementar opcionalmente nuestra nueva demostración wiki.

Paso 0: configurar una nueva aplicación Next.js

Para empezar, vamos a poner en marcha nuestro proyecto Next.js. Usaremos npm o yarn para comenzar:

yarn create next-app # or npx create-next-app 

Una vez que ejecute ese comando, le hará algunas preguntas. Voy a llamar a mi proyecto my-rick-and-morty-wiki, pero puedes nombrarlo como quieras.

Luego le preguntará qué plantilla elegir; continúe y seleccione la plantilla predeterminada.

Finalmente, instalará todas las dependencias.

Cuando haya terminado, puede navegar a ese nuevo directorio y ejecutar:

yarn dev # or npm run dev 

¡Ahora debería tener un servidor local ejecutándose en // localhost: 3000!

Paso 1: obtener personajes de Rick y Morty con una API en Next.js

Ahora que tenemos nuestra aplicación configurada, lo primero que necesitamos para construir nuestra wiki es una lista de personajes.

Para hacer esto, comenzaremos en nuestra página de inicio en pages/index.js.

Next.js construye esta página para nosotros automáticamente. Es la primera página que alguien visitará en nuestro sitio web y tiene algunas características básicas en la plantilla predeterminada como un título, una cuadrícula simple y algunos estilos.

Actualmente, esta página no solicita ningún dato. Para obtener nuestros personajes, vamos a saltar directamente a solicitar este lado del servidor.

Para hacer esto, Next.js nos permite exportar una getServerSidePropsfunción asíncrona justo al lado de nuestra página, que usará para inyectar nuestra página con cualquier dato que obtengamos.

Comencemos agregando el siguiente fragmento sobre nuestro Homecomponente de función:

const defaultEndpoint = `//rickandmortyapi.com/api/character/`; export async function getServerSideProps() { const res = await fetch(defaultEndpoint) const data = await res.json(); return { props: { data } } } 

Esto es lo que estamos haciendo:

• Estamos configurando una variable llamada defaultEndpointque simplemente define nuestro punto final de API predeterminado
• Estamos definiendo nuestra getServerSidePropsfunción que usaremos para recuperar nuestros datos.
• En esa función, primero usamos la fetchAPI para realizar una solicitud a nuestro punto final
• Con su respuesta, ejecutamos el jsonmétodo para poder tomar la salida en formato JSON
• Finalmente, devolvemos un objeto donde ponemos nuestro datadisponible como un accesorio en la propspropiedad

Ahora que estamos haciendo esa solicitud, necesitamos que esté disponible para su uso.

Our dataestá disponible como accesorio, así que creemos un argumento en nuestra Homefunción de componente para capturar eso:

export default function Home({ data }) { 

Para probar esto, podemos usar console.logpara ver los resultados:

export default function Home({ data }) { console.log('data', data); 

Y una vez que guardamos y recargamos la página, ¡ahora podemos ver nuestros resultados!

¡Sigue el compromiso!

Paso 2: mostrar los personajes de Rick y Morty en la página

Ahora que tenemos los datos de nuestros personajes, vamos a mostrarlos en nuestra página.

To start, I’m going to make a few tweaks. I’m going to update:

• The

  title to “Wubba Lubba Dub Dub!”

• The

  description to “Rick and Morty Character Wiki”

I’m also going to update the contents of

to:

     

      
My Character
     

What I’m doing here:

• I’m making the a list as that will be better for accessibility
• I’m making the
• of the
  the card
  • And just changing the

    to “My Character” temporarily

  To make sure our new

  doesn’t mess up the layout with it’s default styles, let’s also add the following to the bottom of the .grid CSS rules:

  list-style: none; margin-left: 0; padding-left: 0; 

  And now if we look at the page, we should see our basic changes.

  

  Next, let’s make our grid load our characters.

  At the top of our Home component function, let’s add:

  const { results = [] } = data; 

  That will destructure our results array from our data object.

  Next, let’s update our grid code:

  
         
  
           {results.map(result => { const { id, name } = result; return ( 
          
  { name }
   ) })} 
         

  Here’s what we’re doing:

  • We’re using the map method to create a new list element for each of our results (or characters)
  • Inside of that, we’re grabbing the id and name from each  character result
  • We’re using the ID as a key for our list element to make React happy
  • We’re updating our header with the name

  And once you save and reload the page, we should now see a new list of our characters from the API!

  

  We can also add an image for each character.

  First, inside of our grid, let’s update our destructure statement to grab the image URL:

  const { id, name, image } = result; 

  Next, let’s add the image above our header:

  And now each of our characters also shows their picture!

  

  Follow along with the commit!

  Step 3: Loading more Rick and Morty characters

  Now if you notice, when we load the page, we only get a certain number of results. By default, the API won’t return the entire list of characters, which makes sense, because it’s really long!

  Instead, it uses pagination and provides us with the “next” endpoint, or the next page of results, that will allow us to load in more results.

  To start, we’re going to use React’s useState hook to store our results in state. We’ll then have the ability to update that state with more results.

  First, let’s import useState from React:

  import { useState } from 'react'; 

  Next, let’s create our state by first renaming our original results variable and setting up our useState instance:

  const { results: defaultResults = [] } = data; const [results, updateResults] = useState(defaultResults); 

  If you save that and reload the page, you shouldn’t notice anything different yet.

  Next, we want to be able to understand in our application what our current endpoint we’ve made a request is, what the next endpoint is, what the previous endpoint is, and how we can update all of that.

  To do this, we’re going to create more state. First, we want to update our destructuring statement with our data to get the info value:

  const { info, results: defaultResults = [] } = data; 

  Next, let’s set up some state using that:

  const [page, updatePage] = useState({ ...info, current: defaultEndpoint }); 

  Here, we’re:

  • Creating a new page state that we can use to get our prev and next values
  • We’re also creating a new value called current we’ll we start off by using our defaultEndpoint, which was the request made on the server

  The idea here, is when we want to load more results, we’re going set up code to watch the value of current and update that value with the next, so when it  changes, we’ll make a new request.

  To do that, let’s add a useEffect hook to make that request:

  const { current } = page; useEffect(() => { if ( current === defaultEndpoint ) return; async function request() { const res = await fetch(current) const nextData = await res.json(); updatePage({ current, ...nextData.info }); if ( !nextData.info?.prev ) { updateResults(nextData.results); return; } updateResults(prev => { return [ ...prev, ...nextData.results ] }); } request(); }, [current]); 

  Here’s what’s going on:

  • First, we’re destructuring the current value from `page
  • We’re creating a useEffect hook that uses current as a dependency. If they value changes, the hook will run
  • If our current value is the same as defaultEndpoint, we don’t run the code, as we already have our request data. Prevents and extra on load request
  • We create an async function that we’re able to run. This allows us to use async/await inside of our useEffect hook
  • We make the request to the current endpoint. With that successful request, we update the page state with the new info like the new prev and next value
  • If our request does not have a previous value, that means it’s the first set of results for the given request, so we should completely replace our results to start from scratch
  • If we do have a previous value, concatenate our new results to the old, as that means we just requested the next page of results

  Again, if you save and reload the page, this still shouldn’t do anything and your page should be where it was before.

  Finally, we’re going to create a Load More button and use it to update the current value to fire off a new request when we want a new page.

  To do that, let’s first add a new button below our grid:

   Load More 

  

  Now we want something to happen when we click that button, so first add an event handler:

  Load More 

  Then above the component return statement, let’s add that function:

  function handleLoadMore() { updatePage(prev => { return { ...prev, current: page?.next } }); } 

  When triggered with our button click, this function will update our page state with a new current value, specifically with the next value which is the endpoint to fetch our next page of results.

  

  And when we save and reload the page, it does just that!

  Follow along with the commit!

  Step 4: Adding the ability to search for Rick and Morty characters

  One of the features out Rick and Morty API provides is the ability to filter results — so basically the ability to search. So let’s add that as a feature.

  First, we need a search form. Let’s add the following snippet under the description paragraph:

    Search  

  Next, let’s add these styles to the bottom of the first block:

  .search input { margin-right: .5em; } @media (max-width: 600px) { .search input { margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: .5em; } .search input, .search button { width: 100%; } } 

  That’s going to give some spacing to our search input and button as well as make it mobile friendly. Feel free to add more styles if you’d like.

  And if we save and refresh our page, we have a simple form.

  

  It doesn’t do anything yet, so let’s make it search when submit the form.

  To start, let’s add an onSubmit attribute to our form:

  And to go with that, let’s define our submit function above our return statement:

  function handleOnSubmitSearch(e) { e.preventDefault(); const { currentTarget = {} } = e; const fields = Array.from(currentTarget?.elements); const fieldQuery = fields.find(field => field.name === 'query'); const value = fieldQuery.value || ''; const endpoint = `//rickandmortyapi.com/api/character/?name=${value}`; updatePage({ current: endpoint }); } 

  Here’s what we’re  doing:

  • First we’re preventing default behavior from the form submission to prevent the page from reloading
  • Next we grab the current target, which is our form
  • We grab the fields from the form by using the elements property. We also turn this into an array so it’s easy to work with
  • We search those fields for our query input
  • We grab the value of that input
  • We create a new endpoint where we filter by name using that query value
  • Finally, we update our current property in our page state to trigger a new request to that endpoint

  And once you save that and reload the page, you can now give search a try. You should be able to type in a name like “rick”, hit enter or click the search button, and you should now see filtered results with the various ricks across the universe!

  

  Follow along with the commit!

  Step 5: Using dynamic routes to link to Rick and Morty character pages

  Now that we have all of our characters, we want to be able to click into those characters and display some additional details. To do that, we’re  going to make use of Next.js’s dynamic routes.

  The first thing we need to do is properly configure our directory structure so Next.js recognizes the dynamic path. In order to set up a dynamic route, we need to create our folder exactly like:

  - pages -- character --- [id] -- index.js 

  Yes, that means you’re literally creating a folder with the name of [id], that’s not meant to be replaced. Next.js recognizes that pattern and will let us use that to create a dynamic route.

  To make creating the page easier, we’re going to simply duplicate our homepage by copying our pages/index.js file into our next directly.

  So we should now have a new page at pages/character/[id]/index.js.

  Next, let’s remove a bunch of stuff so we can get to a good starting point:

  • Remove everything above the return statement in our page’s function component
  • Rename the function component Character
  • Remove the useState and useEffect imports
  • Remove the description, search form, grid, and load more button
  • Optional: remove the footer

  Once you’re done, the top of our page’s function component should look like:

  export default function Character({ data }) { return ( Create Next App    
   Wubba Lubba Dub Dub! 

  While there is some CSS we don’t need, we’re going to leave it all there for this demo. Feel free to clean some of that out later.

  If you navigate manually to /character/1, you should now see a simple page with just a title:

  

  Next, let’s update the data we’re fetching. We can reuse most of the code in our getServerSideProps function.

  We’re going to add a new argument to that getServerSideProps function:

  export async function getServerSideProps({ query }) { 

  When our page is rendered, Next.js injects data into our page and the getServerSideProps function about the environment. Here, we’re destructuring that data to grab the query object which will include any dynamic routing attributes, such as the [id] we’re setting in the route.

  Next, at the top of the getServerSideProps function, let’s destructure the ID:

  const { id } = query; 

  And finally let’s use that ID to dynamically create an endpoint we’ll use to fetch our character data:

  const res = await fetch(`${defaultEndpoint}${id}`); 

  Here, we’re using our character endpoint and appending the dynamic ID of our URL to the end of the URL.

  To test this out, let’s add a console.log to the top of the Character function:

  export default function Character({ data }) { console.log('data', data); 

  And if we hit save and reload our page, we should now see the user details about character number 1 logged out, which is Rick Sanchez!

  

  So we have the data, let’s add it to our page.

  At the top of the character function, let’s add this destructure statement:

  const { name, image, gender, location, origin, species, status } = data; 

  This gives us a bunch of attributes we’re getting right from that data object we saw logged out.

  To use that, we can start by updating the title to that name:

  { name } 

  Also the

  :

  { name }

  At this point, we should now dynamically see Rick’s name.

  

  Next, let’s add this block below our

  to include more of our character details:

  Character Details
          
  
           
  Name: { name } 
           
  Status: { status } 
           
  Gender: { gender } 
           
  Species: { species } 
           
  Location: { location?.name } 
           
  Originally From: { origin?.name } 
          

  Here we’re using our characters image to display a picture of our character and other various metadata to add Character Details.

  We can follow that up by adding this snippet of CSS to our styles:

  .profile { display: flex; margin-top: 2em; } @media (max-width: 600px) { .profile { flex-direction: column; } } .profile-image { margin-right: 2em; } @media (max-width: 600px) { .profile-image { max-width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; } } 

  And now we have our character bio!

  

  So a quick recap, we have our new dynamic page. We can go to /character/1 or any ID to see a specific character. Let’s now update our homepage to link to these pages.

  Back on pages/index.js, our homepage, let’s first import the Link component from Next.js:

  import Link from 'next/link' 

  Next, inside of our grid where we map through our list of results, let’s use our component and update our code:

  { name }

  Here’s what we’re doing:

  • First we’re wrapping our element with a component
  • We add a href and the as properties to describe to Next.js what page we want to link to. We need to use the as property as it’s a dynamic link
  • We remove the href from our element as it’s now being applied to the element

  If we save and reload our homepage, we’ll notice that nothing changed, but when we click any of our characters, we now go to their bio page!

  

  Finally, let’s also add a button to our character bio page that links back to our homepage to make it easier to navigate.

  First, let’s import the Link component:

  import Link from 'next/link'; 

  At the bottom of our tag below our .profile div, let’s add this code:

   Back to All Characters 

  And we can add the following basic styles to simply make it look like a link:

  .back a { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; } 

  And if we reload the page, we now have link that we can click to go back to the main page with all of our characters!

  

  Follow along with the commit!

  Bonus Step: Deploy your Rick and Morty wiki to Vercel!

  Because we’re using Next.js, Vercel makes it super simple to deploy our app.

  To do this, we need to install the Vercel CLI. We can do that by installing it as an npm module globally:

  yarn global add vercel # or npm i -g vercel 

  Now, you  can run the vercel command in your terminal.

  The first time you run this, you’ll be prompted to log in. You’ll want to use your Vercel account to do this. If you don’t have one, you’ll want to sign up for a free account.

  

  With the Vercel CLI installed, we can simply run vercel in our project directory, fill out a few questions, and it will automatically deploy!

  

  You can use pretty much all of the defaults, though you will probably need to use a different project name than I’m using.

  But once finished, we now have successfully deployed our new app to Vercel!

  

  What else can we do?

  More dynamic pages

  Every time you make a request to a character, the API returns other endpoints that you can use such as locations and episodes. We can utilize those endpoints and create new dynamic pages, just like our dynamic character profile pages, to allow people to see more information about a specific location or episode.

  Add some styles

  We stuck with some of the basic styles that Next.js included and added some basic ones just for demonstration purposes. But now that you’re finished, you can have some fun and make it your own!

  Add character filters

  In addition to filtering by name, the API also supports filtering by status. By adding a status parameter to the endpoint URL, just like our name parameter, you can add a new filter to make it easier to find characters that are still alive or not.

  

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