The core App.jsx setup required when building a Zoho Creator Widget using modern React and Vite.
When building complex applications inside Zoho Creator—like interactive kanban boards, drag-and-drop schedulers, or heavy data-visualization dashboards—Vanilla JS becomes difficult to maintain. React is the industry standard, and Vite is the fastest way to build it.
However, integrating the asynchronous ZOHO.CREATOR.init() handshake with React's component lifecycle often confuses developers.
The trick to building React widgets is preventing your application from rendering data-dependent components until the Zoho SDK has finished initializing.
In this boilerplate, we use a simple isInitialized boolean state.
useEffect hook: We run the ZOHO.CREATOR.init() promise exactly once when the App mounts (using the empty dependency array []).if (!isInitialized).getAllRecords) and save the response to standard React state.When building for Zoho Creator, ensure your vite.config.js is set to use relative paths (base: './'), otherwise your assets will 404 when uploaded to Zoho's CDN.
import { useEffect, useState } from 'react'
function App() {
const [isInitialized, setIsInitialized] = useState(false)
const [records, setRecords] = useState([])
useEffect(() => {
// Ensure ZOHO is available on window
window.ZOHO.CREATOR.init().then(() => {
setIsInitialized(true)
// Fetch initial data
window.ZOHO.CREATOR.API.getAllRecords({
reportName: "Employee_Directory"
}).then((response) => {
setRecords(response.data)
})
})
}, [])
if (!isInitialized) return <div>Loading Widget Engine...</div>
return (
<div className="p-4">
<h1 className="text-xl font-bold">Widget Ready</h1>
<p>Found {records.length} records</p>
</div>
)
}
export default App