use_id hook

[rmorshea]

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Current Situation

React has a useId hook.

Proposed Actions

Replicate it here (presumably with uuid).

[Paramjeet-singh23]

Hi @rmorshea, I'm new to the open-source community, can I work on this issue?

[rmorshea]

I may have jumped the gun on this one. I'd like to get some feedback from @Archmonger though.

So, after some investigation, useId was introduced in ReactJS 18 specifically to resolve an issue that's unique to server-side components. In particular, React needs an ID generated via useId server-side when "hydrating" (that is, generating the HTML for the initial page load) to be identical to the ID generated via useId by that same component client-side. Reading the original PR, this leads to a lot of complexity in how useId is actually implemented.

TLDR; In ReactJS, useId exists, and is complicated, because it has to deal with server-side and client-side components.

With that in mind. We have a couple options:

1. Do not implement use_id in ReactPy because we don't have server-side and client-side components - right now, you can make your own "use_id" hook with use_state(lambda: uuid.uuid4().hex).
2. Implement a use_id hook but its basically an alias for use_state(lambda: uuid.uuid4().hex) - users shouldn't be making assumption about how the ID is generated anyway so we could change this later without any issues (ideally).
3. Implement the full use_id algorithm described in the original ReactJS PR - this would be quite complicated.

I'm leaning towards 2, but a second opinion would be helpful.

[Archmonger]

Any implementation that is just a basic uuid4 wrapper is effectively pointless.

Depending on how we implement nesting multi-level client/server side components, option 3 might end up making sense in the future.

I would say we mark this issue as blocked and re-evaluate between option 1 or 3 later.

[Archmonger]

I ended up developing a use_root_id hook within ReactPy-Django, as some users were attempting to rely on the root uuid for some database logic.

We may want to propagate an identical implementation to core within the future.