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

Plugins in Strapi help you add additional features to the existing core set of built-in features. They can be used to extend the API, customize the admin panel, and more. In many cases, you would like your plugin to store data for later retrieval, and to access this data.

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.

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

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

graph LR
    A{Server} -->|Axios instance| B{Admin Panel}
    B --> A

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.