Related articles in Sitecore JSS: custom rendering contents resolver or api call?

Question

We have a requirement to show on the article page a list of articles which have the same topic and author as the current article i.e. "Related articles". I have two ideas about how that can be implemented:

• create a custom rendering contents resolver which would pass a whole list of articles existing in Sitecore (it might be around 40) and then it will get filtered according to topic/author on react side. (or maybe it's actually better to filter in the resolver too and only pass the "related" data to react side?)
• make an api call to backend: create search context and filter the items there & pass the filtered output to the react app

Both seem to be reasonable enough - and it seems like it would be more fun to try the first approach but I'm hesitant because of the large json output for the layout service. What considerations should I take into account to choose between these two options? And... maybe there is a better way I don't know of? Thank you

Answer 1

From my point of view the right way to do it is to go with a a custom rendering contents resolver.

If the json is too big you can use pagination/filters for it.

On all implementation I saw until now for headless is used custom rendering contents resolver.

Answer 2

As per my understanding, you should also have Custom api end points which can be utilized for data orchestration.

It means, whenever you required dependent data you will make a call to Custom API which will internally use layout service and Solr endpoint to return required data in single call with improved performance.

Answer 3

I ended up doing a custom rendering contents resolver like Vlad suggested, and also a search context inside it that filters articles right inside the resolver, that way I only get a required amount of related articles data in the react component.