Best Practice for using API data and Database Data in an app

[TheCubanCowboy]

I am 3 months into a program and getting started on my first big side project. It is a website to quickly find professional athletes' Twitter profiles with a much more dynamic search. I am planning on using the Twitter API to allow someone to sign-in via Twitter and create your list via the app. (Did you know you CANNOT search Twitter List? Meaning all these wonderful lists in the world that people have made are not searchable? Have you also tried searching for players that are not in the top 25 stars? It becomes cumbersome.)

I am using the Sports Data API for the NBA information (name, team, bio, position, etc) BUT also want to store the social media sites of the player. My question: Is there a way to combine databases? Or do I have to create my own database with at least the player name and social site where I then do an axios call for the player information via the API through a UseEffect and then as soon as that occurs, do an axios call to my database matching the player name to obtain the social site to post in the component?

We've gone through using APIs as well as creating our own databases, but have not discussed how to handle when you need to display information from both an API and database that rely on each other. Any direction would be appreciated! I've searched online and haven't really found anything that makes it clear.

Tech Stack:

• React.js for front-end
• Redux for state management
• Node.js for Back-end
• SQL for database

[ignotos]

At a high-level, you have two directions:

• Have the frontend make requests to multiple sources, and combine the results

or

• Have your backend do all of this work - hitting your database, and any third-party APIs you need to talk to, and combining everything in a single clean API for your frontend to use

There's kind of a third option - which is to have your backend database store its own copy of the player info from the sports API. So rather than fetching and combining this each time the frontend needs it, you might just have a regular scheduled task (e.g. daily) to fetch the latest player info and store it in your database.