Pluggable cache strategies?

[ivos]

Have you considered supporting different cache strategies?

Now the cache is hard-coded in the library, but providing a cache interface (or using some standard, existing one) that people can implement and then plug in their own cache might be useful. Some ideas of what could be handy:

1. No cache. In a multi-user app with data being frequently modified, one might want to fetch fresh data from the backend whenever a page is displayed.
2. Time-to-live setting. Some data might have logical lifespan, after which it could be automatically expired and thus saving us clearing the cache imperatively. The timeout might be set on the global level, per-wrapped fn, or per call.

Alternatively, it might be beneficial to use some existing, proven library for caching (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/lru-cache ?) instead of implementing own solution, and allowing the users to configure it.

[andreiduca]

Currently, all data is cached with simple javascript Map objects, without a clearing strategy (only the manual process being available).

However, I have considered both an actual caching strategy, and a multi-level TTL approach. See this comment: https://github.com/andreiduca/use-async-resource/blob/9d09a48/src/cache.ts#L8 😋 I do not have a roadmap for this yet.

A pluggable caching layer is an interesting idea. Adding another library as a dependency is easy and fast to implement, but not necessarily the best idea in terms of bundle size.

I will consider all options.

[lubieowoce]

@andreiduca Any updates? :) idk if you've been following the progress on react 18, but it's looking like react will provide a cache of its own at some point: https://github.com/reactwg/react-18/discussions/25

Also related: https://github.com/reactwg/react-18/discussions/80

[lubieowoce]

Also semi-related: Have you thought of allowing people to scope the cache via a Provider (+fallback to default cache if no Provider used)? That'd be very useful!

[mmasdivins]

In my case the data is frequently modified so I don't want to cache the requests, is there a way to disable cache?

[scrungrth]

I'm trying to add a generic error boundary component w/ retry button but it is cumbersome as in the case of an error I have to know all the apiFns used in order to clear their caches because even errors are cached currently.

[Kleptine]

I'd also like to disable the cache. :(

[Kleptine]

Dumb option:

let [dataReader] = useAsyncResource(nodeValueFunction, GlobalUiState.selected_node);
useEffect(() => {
    resourceCache(nodeValueFunction).clear();
});

[scrungrth]

I ended up forking so that I could update the apiFn(...).then error handler to clear the cache shortly after an error so that I don't need to know what API call failed in my error fallback component in order to retry.