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How to pass data from server to admin panel with a Strapi plugin

Strapi is headless . The admin panel is completely separate from the server.

When developing a Strapi plugin you might want to pass data from the /server to the /admin folder. Within the /server folder you have access to the Strapi object and can do database queries whereas in the /admin folder you can't.

Passing data from the /server to the /admin folder can be done using the admin panel's Axios instance:

To pass data from the /server to /admin folder you would first create a custom admin route and then get the data returned in the admin panel.

Create a custom admin route​

Admin routes are like the routes that you would have for any controller, except that the type: 'admin' declaration hides them from the general API router, and allows you to access them from the admin panel.

The following code will declare a custom admin route for the my-plugin plugin:

/my-plugin/server/routes/index.js
module.exports = {
  'pass-data': {
    type: 'admin',
    routes: [
      {
        method: 'GET',
        path: '/pass-data',
        handler: 'myPluginContentType.index',
        config: {
          policies: [],
          auth: false,
        },
      },
    ]
  }
  // ...
};

This route will call the index method of the myPluginContentType controller when you send a GET request to the /my-plugin/pass-data URL endpoint.

Let's create a basic custom controller that simply returns a simple text:

/my-plugin/server/controllers/my-plugin-content-type.js
'use strict';

module.exports = {
  async index(ctx) {
    ctx.body = 'You are in the my-plugin-content-type controller!';
  }
}

This means that when sending a GET request to the /my-plugin/pass-data URL endpoint, you should get the You are in the my-plugin-content-type controller! text returned with the response.

Get the data in the admin panel​

Any request sent from an admin panel component to the endpoint for which we defined the custom route /my-plugin/pass-data should now return the text message returned by the custom controller.

So for instance, if you create an /admin/src/api/foobar.js file and copy and paste the following code example:

/my-plugin/admin/src/api/foobar.js
import axios from 'axios';

const foobarRequests = {
  getFoobar: async () => {
    const data = await axios.get(`/my-plugin/pass-data`);
    return data;
  },
};
export default foobarRequests;

You will be able to use foobarRequests.getFoobar() in the code of an admin panel component and have it return the You are in the my-plugin-content-type controller! text with the data.

For instance, within a React component, you could use useEffect to get the data after the component initializes:

/my-plugin/admin/src/components/MyComponent/index.js
import foobarRequests from "../../api/foobar";
const [foobar, setFoobar] = useState([]);

// …
useEffect(() => {
  foobarRequests.getFoobar().then(res => {
    setSchemas(res.data);
  });
}, [setFoobar]);
// …

This would set the You are in the my-plugin-content-type controller! text within the foobar data of the component's state.