Building a React Component to Retrieve Data from Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a versatile tool that can serve as a user-friendly and easily editable database, especially for non-developers. While it might not be the most suitable solution for high-traffic websites, it is highly effective for internal sites and creating application prototypes.

In this article, we will explore how to utilize Papa Parse to fetch data from a Google Sheet within a React application. By following these simple steps, you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate Google Sheets into your React projects.

Installing Papa Parse

To begin, let’s install Papa Parse in our React application using NPM. Open your terminal and enter the following command:

npm install papaparse

Papa Parse is an excellent library that simplifies CSV parsing and provides a straightforward way to fetch data from Google Sheets.

For this tutorial, we have created a sample spreadsheet with the following data:

To ensure the data is compatible, keep in mind the following requirements:

• Each column must have a “label” in the first row.
• Avoid using any special characters in the column labels.
• An empty row signifies the end of the sheet, and Google Sheets will stop returning data from that point onward.

Once the sheet is ready, select “File” -> “Publish to the web” to make it publicly visible.

Creating the MovieData.js Component

To start building the component, create a new file called MovieData.js and import the necessary dependencies:

import React, { useState } from "react";
import Papa from "papaparse";

Next, define the MovieData() function and initialize the data variable, which will store the retrieved data:

const MovieData = () => {
  const [data, setData] = useState({});
}

We can now proceed with retrieving data from the Google Sheet. To achieve this, provide the spreadsheet URL to Papa Parse. If the retrieval process succeeds, the results will be stored in the data variable. To enable further processing of this data, we convert it into an array:

const MovieData = () => {
  const [data, setData] = useState({});

  Papa.parse("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SJ8LxWmaxKBTgDJLvfD9NZLctBT931x19-qH2yLxck/pub?output=csv", {
    download: true,
    header: true,
    complete: (results) => {
      setData(results.data);
    },
  });

  const movies = Array.from(data);

  return (
    // TODO: Display the data in HTML
  );
};

export default MovieData;

Make sure to replace the URL with the URL of your specific spreadsheet, while preserving the pub?output=csv portion.

Finally, to render the movie data, add the following code within the return statement:

...
return (
  <ul>
    {movies.map((data) => (
      <li key={data.movie}>
        {data.movie} ({data.year}) - Rating: {data.rating}
      </li>
    ))}
  </ul>
);
...

Note that the attributes movie, year, and rating correspond to the text in the columns of the first row of the spreadsheet. If you are working with a different spreadsheet, make sure to modify these attributes according to the column labels.

That’s all there is to it! You have now successfully learned how to retrieve data from Google Sheets in a React application. Feel free to download the complete source code of this tutorial from GitHub.

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Now go ahead and have fun implementing this feature, and stay tuned for more marketing tips from Bolamarketing.com!