Reading · Rodrigo Pombo · RSS Amplifier

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

— Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock is a debugging tool for React Suspense. It wraps your calls to React.lazy(), provides a simple cache (based on react-cache) and let you pause, delay or invalidate your promises.

🚨 EXPERIMENTAL 🚨

Use this only for experimenting with the new React Concurrent Mode. Hitchcock is inefficient and unstable. Also, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Demos

Movies: A clone of @karl clone of @dan_abramov demo
Suspensify: A clone of the suspense demo from Jared Palmer's React Conf talk.

The code is in the examples folder.

Usage

Try it on CodeSandbox

Add the dependency:

$ yarn add hitchcock

Director

Import the Director component and add it somewhere in your app:

import { Director } from "hitchcock";
function YourApp() {
  return (
    <Director>
      <YourStuff />
    </Director>
  );
}

Lazy

Instead of using React.lazy import lazy from hitchcock:

import { lazy } from "hitchcock";
const HomePage = lazy(() => import("./components/HomePage"));
// Hitchcock's lazy accepts a second parameter with the name of the component:
const ArtistPage = lazy(() => import("./components/ArtistPage"), "ArtistPage");
// it's optional, but recommended, it isn't always easy to guess the name from the import

createResource

import { createResource } from "hitchcock";
const BeerResource = createResource(
  id =>
    fetch(`https://api.punkapi.com/v2/beers/${id}`)
      .then(r => r.json())
      .then(d => d[0]),
  id => `beer-${id}`
);
function Beer({ beerId }) {
  const beer = BeerResource.read(beerId);
  return (
    <>
      <h1>{beer.name}</h1>
      <p>{beer.description}</p>
    </>
  );
}

createResource has two parameters. The first one is a function that returns a promise. The second one is a function that returns an id, that id is used as the key in the cache and also is used as the name of the resource in the debugger.

It returns a resource with a read method that will suspend a component until the resource is ready (when the promise resolves).

Waterfalls

React docs warn about using Suspense as a way to start fetching data when a component renders. The recommended approach is to start fetching before rendering, for example, in an event handler. Hitchcock doesn't solve this problem, but it provides a preload method if you want to try:

import React, { Suspense } from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import { createResource, Director } from "hitchcock";
const BeerResource = createResource(
  id =>
    fetch(`https://api.punkapi.com/v2/beers/${id}`)
      .then(r => r.json())
      .then(d => d[0]),
  id => `beer-${id}`
);
function App() {
  const [beerId, setBeerId] = React.useState(0);
  const deferredBeerId = React.useDeferredValue(beerId, { timeoutMs: 1000 });
  const showBeer = deferredBeerId > 0;
  const handleChange = e => {
    const newBeerId = +e.target.value;
    BeerResource.preload(newBeerId);
    setBeerId(newBeerId);
  };
  return (
    <Director>
      Beer # <input type="number" value={beerId} onChange={handleChange} />
      <Suspense fallback={<div>{`Loading beer #${beerId}...`}</div>}>
        {showBeer && <Beer beerId={deferredBeerId} />}
      </Suspense>
    </Director>
  );
}
function Beer({ beerId }) {
  const beer = BeerResource.read(beerId);
  return (
    <>
      <h1>{beer.name}</h1>
      <p>{beer.description}</p>
    </>
  );
}
const container = document.getElementById("root");
ReactDOM.createRoot(container).render(<App />);

Contributing

$ git clone git@github.com:pomber/hitchcock.git
$ cd hitchcock
$ npx lerna bootstrap

Run the examples:

$ yarn start:example movies
$ yarn start:example suspensify

Publish new version:

$ yarn build:packages
$ npx lerna publish

License

Released under MIT license.