How to Properly Display User Text on a React Canvas Using State

Learn how to fetch user information and display it dynamically on a canvas in a React app. Follow our step-by-step guide for the best practices!
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How to Properly Display User Text on a React Canvas Using State

When working with React, one common challenge is ensuring that your UI components update based on the state of your application. This is particularly true when dealing with asynchronous data such as fetching user information from a database. In this post, we'll tackle a specific scenario: displaying user text on a canvas dynamically after fetching the user's name and surname from an API.

The Problem

You might encounter a situation where you fetch a user from your database, and then try to display their name on a canvas. If the canvas is rendered before the user data is available, you'll end up with undefined values being displayed. This is problematic, as it will not reflect the correct information for the user.

Example Code

For context, here's a simplified version of the problem within a React component:

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

Challenges

Drawing Timing: The drawing function on the canvas is invoked before the user data is set.

The Solution

To ensure that your canvas reflects the correct user information, you can restructure your code. The strategy is to wait for the user data to be set before invoking the drawing operations on the canvas. We can accomplish this using the useEffect hook in React.

Step-by-Step Fix

Update the Initialization Logic: Move the init function to be called after currentUser is set.

Incorporate a Delay: Add a timeout to ensure the canvas rendering only occurs once the data is fully ready.

Here is the updated code:

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

Explanation of the Changes

Moved Canvas Drawing Logic: The init function is now called inside an effect that listens to changes in currentUser. This makes sure it is invoked only after the user information is available.

Dynamic User Data: By wrapping the call to init in a useEffect, the canvas will update whenever the currentUser state changes, ensuring that the canvas renders correctly with the user's name and surname.

Conclusion

By structuring your component to fetch user data and then initialize the canvas based on that data, you ensure that your application is both functional and user-friendly. This approach is a great way to manage state and effects in React.

If you encounter further challenges, don't hesitate to explore additional improvements and optimizations!