Discussion on: Must I use Nextjs Data Fetching Methods?

[NJOKU SAMSON EBERE]

Thank you Bino. 🤗

Is there a way you can enlighten me on this static/server rendering thing?

Like I want to know why it is a better way of doing things

[Saurabh Sharma]

It you fetch the data in getInitialProps then your html has the data.

Benefits:

• it whole purpose of server side rendering
• better SEO
• faster website because the client didn't have to wait for react to load, for data loading, and in good cases it can redydrate the cache, so no need to load data on client

[NJOKU SAMSON EBERE]

Thank you Saurabh. These benefits sounds so awesome 🤗

I will dig more to find out why it’s not working for me 🤦🏻‍♂️😊

[Saurabh Sharma]

I can't say why it isnt working for you.

But from my debugging experiences in next.js, i will say fetch on server isnt same as fetch on client

[NJOKU SAMSON EBERE]

Wow... Any suggestions on what I might have to try out?

[Saurabh Sharma]

What are you using for data fetching?

If apollo then see next.js apollo example, apollo needs additional code for SSR

[NJOKU SAMSON EBERE]

I use node-fetch.

Maybe I should tryout Appolo then

[Saurabh Sharma]

Apollo is only for graphql

[Saurabh Sharma]

Are you getting any error?

[NJOKU SAMSON EBERE]

No errors. Nothing comes up in my console at all.

That’s more reason why it is frustrating 😆

[Louis-André Labadie]

node-fetch is specifically a NodeJS library. With Next, if a page is rendered on the server, it will run in a Node environment. If it's rendered by the browser, it will run in the browser.

If you try to use node-fetch in the browser, it will probably fail. What you can try is to replace node-fetch with isomorphic-fetch, which will give you an equivalent fetch method you can safely use in both environments.

[NJOKU SAMSON EBERE]

Thank you Louis. I will check that out