The `useAccount` Hook

wagmi is a library that provides React hooks that trade a somewhat complex setup process for a great developer experience when building a frontend around the constraints and quirks of onchain building. One of the hooks, useAccount, provides access to information about your users' wallet and connection information.

You can use this for connection-status-based rendering, to enable or disable controls or views based on address, and many other useful tasks.

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Objectives

By the end of this guide you should be able to:

• Implement the useAccount hook to show the user's address, connection state, network, and balance
• Implement an isMounted hook to prevent hydration errors

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Displaying Connection Information

We'll be working from an app generated by RainbowKit's quick start. Either open the one you created when we were exploring Wallet Connectors, or create a new one for this project.

Either way, change the list of chains to only include baseSepolia as the network option. You don't want to accidentally spend real money while developing!

You can set up your providers as described in Introduction to Providers, or use the default from RainbowKit:

const config = getDefaultConfig({
  appName: 'RainbowKit App',
  projectId: 'YOUR APP ID',
  chains: [baseSepolia],
  ssr: true,
});

Either way, be sure to set ssr to true, or you will get a hydration error from Next.js.

The useAccount Hook

The useAccount hook allows you to access account and connection data from within any of your components.

Add a folder for components and a file called ConnectionWindow.tsx in that folder. Add the below component to the file, and replace the boilerplate text in index.tsx with an instance of it.

// ConnectionWindow.tsx
export function ConnectionWindow() {
  return (
    <div>
      <p>Connection Status</p>
    </div>
  );
}

// index.tsx
import { ConnectButton } from '@rainbow-me/rainbowkit';
import type { NextPage } from 'next';
import Head from 'next/head';
import styles from '../styles/Home.module.css';
import { ConnectionWindow } from '../components/ConnectionWindow';

const Home: NextPage = () => {
  return (
    <div className={styles.container}>
      <main className={styles.main}>
        <ConnectButton />
        <ConnectionWindow />
      </main>
    </div>
  );
};

export default Home;

For the purposes of this exercise, open styles/Home.module.css and delete or comment out .main. Doing so will move the content to the top of the page, which will prevent the RainbowKit modal from blocking your ability to see changes.

Return to ConnectionWindow.tsx and add the useAccount hook to the top, where you'd add any state variables. The general pattern for wagmi hooks is you decompose the properties you want to use from a function call of the name of the hook. For some, you'll add a config object to that call, but it's not needed for this one.

import { useAccount } from 'wagmi';

export function ConnectionWindow() {
  const { address, isConnected, isConnecting, isDisconnected } = useAccount();

  return (
    <div>
      <h2>Connection Status</h2>
    </div>
  );
}

You can see all the deconstructable return options in the UseAccountReturnType:

Update your <div> to show the address of the connected wallet:

<div>
  <h2>Connection Status</h2>
  <div>
    <p>{'Address: ' + address}</p>
  </div>
</div>

Test it out by connecting and disconnecting with your wallet. You should see your full address when you are connected, and the address will be undefined when you are disconnected.

Connection Status Conditional Rendering

It isn't very nice to display a value of undefined to the user, so let's use the connection status values for conditional rendering depending on if the user is disconnected, connected, or connecting.

A common pattern is to use the conditional directly in the html return of a component or render function. For example, we could add a line to show that we're connecting as demonstrated:

<div>
  <h2>Connection Information</h2>
  <div>
    {!isConnecting && <p>Please click Connect in your wallet...</p>}
    <p>{"Address: " + address}</p>
  </div>
</div>

Connect and disconnect your wallet a few times. The isConnecting state is true while the Connect to website wallet UI is open.

Autoconnect is enabled by default, so you'll need to clear the connection from your wallet settings to see this more than once. Otherwise, it will briefly flash as the autoconnect processes.

Use the connected property in the same way to only render the wallet address if there is a wallet connected. Similarly, use the isDisconnected property to show a message asking the user to connect.

<div>
  <h2>Connection Information</h2>
  <div>
    {isConnecting && <p>Please click Connect in your wallet...</p>}
    {isConnected && <p>{"Address: " + address}</p>}
    {isDisconnected && <p>Please connect your wallet to use this app.</p>}
  </div>
</div>

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Conclusion

In this guide, you've learned how the useAccount hook gives you access to information about the user's connection status and wallet. It can be used in any part of your app that is wrapped by the wagmi context provider. You've also learned a technique for conditional rendering based on connection status. Finally, you've learned to set the ssr flag to prevent hydration errors due to the client and server possessing different information about the user's connection status.

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