Build WordPress App with React Native #7: pull to refresh then Infinite scroll

8 Feb 2020

3 min read

This series intends to show how I build app to serve content from my WordPress blog by using react native. Since, my blog is talking about react-native, the series and the articles are interconnected. We will learn how to set-up many packages that make our lives comfortable and learn how to deal with WordPress APIs. Here, the most prominent features talked about in the book are the dark theme , offline mode, infinite scroll and many more. You can discover much more in this series.this inspiration to do this tutorial series came from the React Native Mobile Templates

In case of wanting to learn from the beginning, all the previous parts for this tutorial series are available below:

Here, we are going to implement pull to refresh which will refresh and make API call again to refresh the posts in the Home screen list. Also, we are going to add the Infinite scroll to the bottom of Home screen. The infinite scroll will trigger the request to server which will load more articles into the list.

Implementing Pull to Refresh

First, we are going to implement pull to refresh. For that, we need to define a state variable called isFetching which will handle the hiding and showing of refresh loader. The isFetching state is defined as shown in the code snippet below:

  this.state = { 
         lastestpost:[],
         isFetching: false,
      }

Next, we need to create a function called onRefresh() which will trigger when we pull the pull to refresh trigger.

    onRefresh() {
         this.setState({ isFetching: true }, function() { this.fetchLastestPost() 
        });
      }

Here, we have changed the state of isFetching to true and also called the fetchLastestPost function again. This will cause the re-fetch of the posts by making an API call to the server.

Now, we need to add the onRefresh function to the onRefresh event of the FlatList as shown in the code snippet below:

    <FlatList
     data={ this.state.lastestpost }
     onRefresh={() => this.onRefresh()}
     refreshing={this.state.isFetching}

And, in the fetchLastestPost function, we also need to change the state of isFetching to false to hide the scroll loader.

    async fetchLastestPost() {
        const response = await fetch(
          'https://kriss.io/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=5'
        );
        const post = await response.json();
        this.setState({ lastestpost: post, isFetching: false});
      }

Hence, we will get the following result in the emulator screen:

As we can see, when we pull the list downward the spinner appears and the list is refreshed.

Implementing Infinite Scroll

Now, we are going to add the infinite scroll to the bottom of the Home screen. The idea is load more articles when we scroll to the bottom. For that, we need to define a state variable called page which will handle which data we are fetching from the WordPress API.

    this.state = {
          lastestpost: [],
          isFetching: false,
          page: 1,
        };

Then, we are going to create a new function called handleLoadMore and call it in the onEndReached event of the FlatList. We are also configuring some addition props to the FlatList such as onEndReachedThreshold which controls the trigger of function based on how far we are from the bottom of the list. The overall implementation is provided in the code snippet below:

    onEndReached={this.handleLoadMore}
    onEndReachedThreshold={0.1}
    ListFooterComponent={this.renderFooter}

Now, the implementation of the handleLoadMore function is provided in the code snippet below:

    handleLoadMore = () => {
        this.setState(
          {
            page: this.state.page + 1,
          },
          () => {
            this.fetchLastestPost();
          },
        );
      };

Here, we have made increment to the page state variable and then called the fetchLastestPost() function again.

Now, we need to make some configuration in the fetching of API as well which will be based on the page number as shown in the code snippet below:

    async fetchLastestPost() {
        let page = this.state.page;
        const response = await fetch(
          `https://kriss.io/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=5&page=${page}`,
        );
        const post = await response.json();
        this.setState({
          lastestpost: page === 1 ? post : [...this.state.lastestpost, ...post],
          isFetching: false,
        });
      }

Here, we have

added page to the query in order to fetch next page.
Then after fetching, we have concatenated it to the lastestpost state variable.

Now, in order to add the Infinite scroll, we need to make use of ActivityIndicator component from the react-native package. First, we need to import it as shown in the code snippet below:

    import {View, Text, FlatList, ActivityIndicator} from 'react-native';

Then, we need to implement a new function called renderFooter() which will return the template for ActivityIndicator wrapped by View component with styles or nothing based on the isFetching state as shown in the code snippet below:

    renderFooter = () => {
        if (this.state.isFetching) return null;
        return (
          <View
            style={{
              paddingVertical: 20,
              borderTopWidth: 1,
              borderColor: "#CED0CE"
            }}
          >
            <ActivityIndicator animating size="large" />
          </View>
        );
      };

Here, if the request is not sent then, we hide the spinner. Hence, we will get the following result in the emulator screen:

As we can see, the spinner appears and loads the addition article cards to the list.

Hence, we have successfully completed the implementation of the Home screen list. Now, we are going to create the template for the Single Post.

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to configure the pull to refresh function in both android and iOS. Lastly, we learned how to set up the infinite loader to trigger load more function which loads additional articles into the list.