Pages router: API for shallow routing

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#833 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
typescript
Domain
frontend

Research direction

Read the implementation of router.visit first and trace what it does in order: the fetch, the route-state update, the history write and the scroll-restoration bookkeeping. Compare that with the raw history.replaceState fallback described here, which leaves useRouter().url and .query stale, and identify where route state is derived so a shallow variant can update it without fetching. Done means router.visit(url, { replace: true, shallow: true }) changes history and router state while no request runs and deferred props are untouched, with a test covering the no-fetch guarantee.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Void version: 1.9.1, affecting every adapter

Use case

The simplest that I hit: A page has multiple side panels with info. Which panel is open depends on the query string (/page?panel=X), so the view can be shared and other pages can link to it.
The server ignores the param: it's left out of revalidateQueryAllowlist, so every variant shares one ISR entry, and the panel opens on the client.

When the user opens, switches or closes a panel, ?panel= should change in place: no new history entry, no request, no re-render.

Current status with today's API

The only Void way to change the query is

router.visit(url, { replace: true, preserveState: true, preserveScroll: true });

which is a full GET navigation. For state the server doesn't render, that means:

  • The page data is fetched again on every change, in our case that's about 122 KB except the exact entry was cached already.
  • Deferred props go back to loading, which would include our panel.

So instead of using it we fall back to the raw history.replaceState. That works, but the router no longer matches the address bar: useRouter().url / .query keep reporting the old query until the next navigation.

API Proposal

Something like

router.replaceUrl(url); // or router.visit(url, { replace: true, shallow: true })

This would:

  • write history (replace, or push as an option),
  • update the router's route state
  • keep scroll-restoration bookkeeping in step,
  • does not fetch, re-render, or touch deferred props.

This is similar to what other meta frameworks do, e.g. SvelteKit's replaceState or Next.js's shallow routing.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
684
Forks
83
Avg merge
15h 22m
Merged PRs (30d)
219

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from voidzero-dev/void

All issues in voidzero-dev/void

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.