side effects of server functions always re-rendering server components

[jldec]

Unlike nextjs, rwsdk server functions always re-render all server components on the page when a server function is invoked.

This may have unintended side-effects e,g, when server-rendering is not idempotent. E.g. If the page is rendered from a server-side data stream, that stream will be regenerated or refetched which may not be the desired behavior.

To illustrate this, try visiting the following 2 pages, and clicking on the button.

• https://jsx-stream-iota.vercel.app/
• https://rwsdk-jsx-stream.jldec.workers.dev/

(note that safari won't stream on the initial page load, but other browsers will)

My suggestion, would be to make this behavior opt-in (or opt-out) for server functions, instead of always re-rendering all the server components on the page.

nextjs.mov

rwsdk.mov

[jldec]

Github links:

• https://github.com/jldec/next-jsx-stream
• https://github.com/jldec/rwsdk-jsx-stream

[jldec]

One way to configure a page would be to follow the nextjs approach of setting an export in the tsx like this one

A new option on the rwsdk render() function in the router (similar to 'ssr: false') would be more elegant.

b.t.w that force-dynamic setting is required in nextjs to prevent caching the SSR'ed HTML, which doesn't work with streamed responses. Auto-caching is one of the few things that make nextjs RSCs different from rwsdk.

[justinvdm]

Thank you for the helpful detail @jldec!

I like the idea of having render-level control here - an "all or nothing" switch for whether a page re-renders after a server function call.

We can definitely explore adding an API for that, as a start.