Revalidation

👨‍💼 You might notice that once we make a change to the ship name, the list on the left doesn't update immediately. We are actually sending the updated UI so what's the problem?

The problem is we're ignoring the RSC payload. We're only doing something with the returnValue. Instead, we need to use the root as well to update our component to use that value.

But here's the tricky thing. The callServer function is outside our component so how can we call setContentKey within our startTransition?

We use fancy JavaScript tricks of course! Here's an example of what I mean:

function increment() {
	throw new Error('This was called before Counter rendered')
}

function Counter() {
	const [count, setCount] = useState(0)

	useEffect(() => {
		increment = () => setCount(c => c + 1)
	}, [])

	return <button onClick={increment}>{count}</button>
}

With this setup, you can call increment from anywhere in your code and it will update the Counter component. This is because we're using a closure to keep the setCount function around.

This totally breaks reusability of the component, but in our case we only have a single Root component anyway, so it's perfectly safe.

Another challenge we're going to have in this bit is we need to only update the cached value after the response has finished streaming, otherwise we'll just render the pending UI right away which would be annoying.

You might think about doing something like this:

const actionResponse = await createFromFetch(fetchPromise)
contentCache.set(contentKey, actionResponse)
updateContentKey(contentKey)
return actionResponse.returnValue

Unfortunately, this won't work because the promise resolves as soon as the stream starts not when it ends. So we need something a little more fancy:

function onStreamFinished(fetchPromise, onFinished) {
	// create a promise chain that resolves when the stream is completely consumed
	return (
		fetchPromise
			// clone the response so createFromFetch can use it (otherwise we lock the reader)
			// and wait for the text to be consumed so we know the stream is finished
			.then(response => response.clone().text())
			.then(onFinished)
	)
}

Basically, we're cloning the response so we can read the text from it without locking the reader (otherwise we'd prevent createFromFetch from using it). This way we can know when the stream is finished and update:

const fetchPromise = fetch(/*...*/)
onStreamFinished(fetchPromise, () => {
	updateContentKey(contentKey)
})
const actionResponsePromise = createFromFetch(fetchPromise)
// ... etc

It's important that you call onStreamFinished before calling createFromFetch so we can make a copy of the response before createFromFetch starts consuming it.

So yeah, doing a couple interesting things in this one, but it should result in a great user experience! Enjoy!

05. Server Actions/04. Revalidation (💪 problem)

Revalidation