👀 Views: 71 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-07-02

react useEffect async-await state-management javascript

I'm prototyping a solution and I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I'm currently building a user profile page using React 17.0.2 and I'm facing an issue with correctly synchronizing the UI state when an API call is delayed. The goal is to fetch user details and display them, but I've noticed that when the API response takes a bit longer, it causes the UI to flicker and show outdated information briefly before rendering the new data. I have implemented a `useEffect` hook to handle the API call, but it seems that the state updates are not being managed as I expected. Here's the relevant portion of my component: ```javascript import React, { useEffect, useState } from 'react'; const UserProfile = ({ userId }) => { const [user, setUser] = useState(null); const [loading, setLoading] = useState(true); useEffect(() => { const fetchUser = async () => { setLoading(true); try { const response = await fetch(`https://api.example.com/users/${userId}`); if (!response.ok) throw new Error('Network response was not ok'); const data = await response.json(); setUser(data); } catch (error) { console.error('Error fetching user:', error); } finally { setLoading(false); } }; fetchUser(); }, [userId]); if (loading) return <p>Loading user profile...</p>; if (!user) return <p>No user found.</p>; return ( <div> <h1>{user.name}</h1> <p>Email: {user.email}</p> </div> ); }; ``` When an API call takes longer than expected, the loading state is correctly set, but it seems like there is still a moment where the last fetched user data is displayed before the new data comes in. I've tried adding a loading spinner, but it doesn’t help with the outdated data flash. Is there a better way to handle this scenario to avoid showing stale data during the loading state? I've also considered using a `useRef` to store the previous user data but I'm unsure how to implement that correctly. Any suggestions for best practices or alternative approaches would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger API I'm building. Has anyone else encountered this? My development environment is Windows 10.