Hello,
I was wondering what options there are, if I want to integrate an external API into a Webflow Site besides using JS to make all the calls.
The thing that I don’t like about using JS to make all the calls and loading the data into the front-end is that it’s always repeating code, which is not particularly clean.
For example if I would want to load in a list of books from an external API and create a list of elements with each book I got from the external API, I would first have to make the API call, then use JavaScript to get the parent element that will be duplicated for each book and which displays all the data for the book, then clone that parent element for each of the returned books, manipulate the clone with all the data of the book, and then append the element to the collection wrapper element that holds all the books. This is done for each object in the JSON response. In my opinion that’s bad code and a huge waste of time, when you have to do that for each collection that you want to integrate from an API.
Is there another option? Maybe a platform that offers easier API integration for static sites?
I know that there are many web scrapers out there, where you can create an API by selecting all the different elements that you want to request data from an external site programmatically. Maybe there is a software out there that does that for integration of API data, instead of extraction of data?
Another way I saw that enabled API integration without JS calls like that was the way of integration of data from sheetsu.com. They let you write the API endpoints into the HTML directly using attributes. Don’t know to what extent that feature works, but it’s an interesting idea.
So the TL;DR would be: Is there a no-code/low-code way of integrating an external APIs data into a static site/webflow page?
I looked around the internet for solutions like that for hours, but didn’t find anything.
Would love to hear what you think and if you would be interested in something like that as well.
I wish you all the best,
Marcel