How to Fetch and Show Remote Data on a Widget?
This article is originally published at swiftsenpai.com
When creating widgets for your apps, sometimes it might be sufficient to just display data that is locally generated. However, in most cases, we will want our widgets to display data that is fetched from a remote server.
In this article, let’s explore this topic. We will create a sample widget that can make a RESTful API call, download an image, and then show it on the widget. There are a lot of grounds to cover, so let’s begin!
The Doggy Widget 🐶
The widget we are going to create is called Doggy Widget. It is a simple widget that shows you random dog images all day long.
We will use Dog API as our widget’s remote server. Calling the API will give us the following JSON response that contains a random dog image URL:
{
"status": "success",
"message": "https://images.dog.ceo/breeds/redbone/n02090379_4402.jpg"
}The Doggy Widget will call the API every 15 minutes. Once the image is downloaded, we will cache it locally and show it on the widget.
