How to add pagination to 3rd party API (26 lines of code!)

Even though this example require Node.js, you don’t have to be afraid if you only got frontend experience. This requires minimal Javascript knowledge.

I once wanted to fetch an open third party API, which consisted of 150.000 objects. This took about 30 seconds to get response - which made it more or less useless for me, as a frontend developer. I want to share with you, how I solved it with minimal Node experience.

So to get started, we will setup a Node project and install express, node-fetch and cors.

mkdir node-pagination
cd node-pagination
npm init
npm install express node-fetch cors
touch index.js

Now open the project with your favourite editor.

First of all, go to your package.json file and add start to your scripts.

"scripts": {
  "start": "node index.js"
}

That is all we have to change in package.json

Now go to index.js file and add

const express = require("express");
const fetch = require("node-fetch");
const cors = require("cors");
const app = express();
app.use(cors())
let data = null;
let url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/albums/1/photos";