I’m having an issue with posting data to an express REST API I have using fetch
in my react-native app. Here’s my code:
/**
* Sample React Native App
* https://github.com/facebook/react-native
* @flow
*/
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import {
AppRegistry,
StyleSheet,
Text,
View
} from 'react-native';
import Button from 'react-native-button';
import DeviceInfo from 'react-native-device-info'
export default class ReliefMobile extends Component {
state: any;
constructor(props) {
super(props);
this.state = {
currentLocation: {latitude: 40.6391, longitude: 10.9969},
name: 'Some dumb name',
description: 'Some dumb description',
deviceId: DeviceInfo.getUniqueID()
}
}
addData() {
fetch('http://localhost:3000/api/effort/add', {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Accept': 'application/json',
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
body: JSON.stringify({
name: this.state.name,
description: this.state.description,
deviceId: this.state.deviceId,
currentLocation: this.state.currentLocation
})
});
}
render() {
return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<Text style={styles.welcome}>
Welcome to React Native
</Text>
<Text style={styles.instructions}>
Your device ID is {DeviceInfo.getUniqueID()}
</Text>
<Text style={styles.instructions}>
Effort Name: {this.state.name}
</Text>
<Text style={styles.instructions}>
Effort Description: {this.state.description}
</Text>
<Text style={styles.instructions}>
Location: {this.state.currentLocation.latitude}, {this.state.currentLocation.longitude}
</Text>
<Button onPress={this.addData}>Add data</Button>
</View>
);
}
}
const styles = StyleSheet.create({
container: {
flex: 1,
justifyContent: 'center',
alignItems: 'center',
backgroundColor: '#F5FCFF',
},
welcome: {
fontSize: 20,
textAlign: 'center',
margin: 10,
},
instructions: {
textAlign: 'center',
color: '#333333',
marginBottom: 5,
},
});
AppRegistry.registerComponent('ReliefMobile', () => ReliefMobile);
When I try to press my button to call the addData
function, I get this error: undefined is not an object (evaluating this.state.name)
.
On load of the app, my state variables seem to be loading just fine into the <Text/>
areas:
But when I submit this is what shows:
When I change the body of the fetch
to be something like
body: JSON.stringify({name: 'some name', description: 'some description'})
It works fine. So I thought that the value of this
might not be the same from within the fetch
function, so at the top of addData()
I did something like let that = this;
and set all my state variables to that.state.name, etc
but that still didn’t work.
3
Answers
React handlers are not automatically bound to the element/class they are in.
https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/handling-events.html
Excerpt from above link
Probably you need to bind the context. In your onClick method add something like this:
onClick={this.addData.bind(this)}
. This way the method can have access to the state object.You should bind in your constructor not in the render function. In your constructor, just add:
this.addData = this.addDate.bind(this);
You can also use ES6 as another alternative:
addData = () => { ... }
That will work to as documented here: https://babeljs.io/blog/2015/06/07/react-on-es6-plus under the arrow function section.