How to Effectively Redirect from an Express API Call in Your React App

Learn how to manage redirects in your React application when making API calls to your Express backend, ensuring seamless navigation without CORS issues.
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Redirect from Express API Call in Your React App

In the world of web development, many developers face an essential challenge: managing redirects between their front-end applications and back-end APIs. This challenge becomes particularly significant when you’re building a React application that communicates with an Express server. If you’ve encountered issues with redirects causing CORS errors or not functioning as expected, you’re not alone!

Understanding the Problem

Let’s imagine you have a route in your React application that is supposed to redirect the user after making an API call to your Express backend. The flow you want to achieve is as follows:

The user accesses your frontend route hosting the redirect component.

An Axios request is made to the backend.

The backend responds with a redirect URL.

The frontend redirects the user to that URL.

However, you may run into a CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) error which can prevent the redirect from happening as intended. In this guide, we’ll show you how to effectively set up this redirect process while avoiding common pitfalls.

The Current Setup

Your existing setup in the React component may look something like this:

Step 1: The React Component

Your React component makes an API call on mount, as shown below:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 2: The API Call

The Axios call to your backend looks like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 3: The Express Route

On your backend, you handle the redirect like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

If this setup gives you a CORS error, it’s essential to rethink your approach.

A Better Solution: Using React Router's History

Instead of relying on the backend to handle the redirect, we can use React Router's history to manage redirection directly in the frontend:

Step 1: Modify the API Call

Update your Axios call to directly redirect using the history prop. Here’s how:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 2: Wrapping Your Component with withRouter

To use the history prop, wrap your component with withRouter. Update your export statement:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Conclusion

With these changes, the flow of your application will be seamless, and you’ll avoid CORS errors typically generated by redirects in API responses. Instead of burdening your backend with redirect logic, you effectively handle it from within your React app.

Implementing routing directly in the frontend using React Router ensures a smoother user experience and cleaner architecture.

Now that you understand how to effectively redirect after an API call in your React application, you're well on your way to achieving better navigation without the hassle of CORS-related issues.