What is the purpose of having functions like componentWillMount in React.js?

Question

I have been writing components in React.js recently. I have never had to use methods like componentWillMount and componentDidMount.

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Answer 1

In my project which is a dashboarding tool, I have used componentDidMount().

On home page previously saved dashboards appear on the sidebar. I make an ajax call within componentDidMount() of component rendering Homepage, so as to fetch list of dashboards asynchronously after the page has been rendered.