Currently you can accidentally pass React Element to a Server Action. It
warns but in prod it actually works because we can encode the symbol and
otherwise it's mostly a plain object. It only works if you only pass
host components and no function props etc. which makes it potentially
error later. The first thing this does it just early hard error for
elements.
I made Lazy work by unwrapping though since that will be replaced by
Promises later which works.
Our protocol is not fully symmetric in that elements flow from Server ->
Client. Only the Server can resolve Components and only the client
should really be able to receive host components. It's not intended that
a Server can actually do something with them other than passing them to
the client.
In the case of a Reply, we expect the client to be stateful. It's
waiting for a response. So anything we can't serialize we can still pass
by reference to an in memory object. So I introduce the concept of a
TemporaryReferenceSet which is an opaque object that you create before
encoding the reply. This then stashes any unserializable values in this
set and encode the slot by id. When a new response from the Action then
returns we pass the same temporary set into the parser which can then
restore the objects. This lets you pass a value by reference to the
server and back into another slot.
For example it can be used to render children inside a parent tree from
a server action:
```
export async function Component({ children }) {
"use server";
return <div>{children}</div>;
}
```
(You wouldn't normally do this due to the waterfalls but for advanced
cases.)
A common scenario where this comes up accidentally today is in
`useActionState`.
```
export function action(state, formData) {
"use server";
if (errored) {
return <div>This action <strong>errored</strong></div>;
}
return null;
}
```
```
const [errors, formAction] = useActionState(action);
return <div>{errors}<div>;
```
It feels like I'm just passing the JSX from server to client. However,
because `useActionState` also sends the previous state *back* to the
server this should not actually be valid. Before this PR this actually
worked accidentally. You get a DEV warning but it used to work in prod.
Once you do something like pass a client reference it won't work tho. We
could perhaps make client references work by stashing where we got them
from but it wouldn't work with all possible JSX.
By adding temporary references to the action implementation this will
work again - on the client. It'll also be more efficient since we don't
send back the JSX content that you shouldn't introspect on the server
anyway.
However, a flaw here is that the progressive enhancement of this case
won't work because we can't use temporary references for progressive
enhancement since there's no in memory stash. What is worse is that it
won't error if you hydrate. ~It also will error late in the example
above because the first state is "undefined" so invoking the form once
works - it errors on the second attempt when it tries to send the error
state back again.~ It actually errors on the first invocation because we
need to eagerly serialize "previous state" into the form. So at least
that's better.
I think maybe the solution to this particular pattern would be to allow
JSX to serialize if you have no temporary reference set, and remember
client references so that client references can be returned back to the
server as client references. That way anything you could send from the
server could also be returned to the server. But it would only deopt to
serializing it for progressive enhancement. The consequence of that
would be that there's a lot of JSX that might accidentally seem like it
should work but it's only if you've gotten it from the server before
that it works. This would have to have pair them somehow though since
you can't take a client reference from one implementation of Flight and
use it with another.
There are three parts to an RSC set up:
- React
- Bundler
- Endpoints
Most customizability is in the bundler configs. We deal with those as
custom builds.
To create a full set up, you need to also configure ways to expose end
points for example to call a Server Action. That's typically not
something the bundler is responsible for even though it's responsible
for gathering the end points that needs generation. Exposing which
endpoints to generate is a responsibility for the bundler.
Typically a meta-framework is responsible for generating the end points.
There's two ways to "call" a Server Action. Through JS and through a
Form. Through JS we expose the `callServer` callback so that the
framework can call the end point.
Forms by default POST back to the current page with an action serialized
into form data, which we have a decoder helper for. However, this is not
something that React is really opinionated about just like we're not
opinionated about the protocol used by callServer.
This exposes an option to configure the encoding of the form props.
`encodeFormAction` is to the SSR is what `callServer` is to the Browser.
Currently when we SSR a Flight response we do not emit any resources for
module imports. This means that when the client hydrates it won't have
already loaded the necessary scripts to satisfy the Imports defined in
the Flight payload which will lead to a delay in hydration completing.
This change updates `react-server-dom-webpack` and
`react-server-dom-esm` to emit async script tags in the head when we
encounter a modules in the flight response.
To support this we need some additional server configuration. We need to
know the path prefix for chunk loading and whether the chunks will load
with CORS or not (and if so with what configuration).
We currently support passing an XHR request to Flight for broader compat
and possibly better perf than `fetch()`. However, it's a little tricky
because ideally the RSC protocol is really meant to support binary data
too. XHR does support binary but it doesn't support it while also
streaming.
We could maybe support this only when you know it's going to be only
text streams but it has some limitations in how we can encode separators
if we can't use binary.
Nobody is really asking for this so we might as well delete it.
The bindings upstream in Relay has been removed so we don't need these
builds anymore. The idea is to revisit an FB integration of Flight but
it wouldn't use the Relay specific bindings. It's a bit unclear how it
would look but likely more like the OSS version so not worth keeping
these around.
The `dom-relay` name also included the FB specific Fizz implementation
of the streaming config so I renamed that to `dom-fb`. There's no Fizz
implementation for Native yet so I just removed `native-relay`.
We created a configurable fork for how to encode the output of Flight
and the Relay implementation encoded it as JSON objects instead of
strings/streams. The new implementation would likely be more stream-like
and just encode it directly as string/binary chunks. So I removed those
indirections so that this can just be declared inline in
ReactFlightServer/Client.
Builds on top of https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/26661
This lets you pass FormData objects through the Flight Reply
serialization. It does that by prefixing each entry with the ID of the
reference and then the decoding side creates a new FormData object
containing only those fields (without the prefix).
Ideally this should be more generic. E.g. you should be able to pass
Blobs, Streams and Typed Arrays by reference inside plain objects too.
You should also be able to send Blobs and FormData in the regular Flight
serialization too so that they can go both directions. They should be
symmetrical. We'll get around to adding more of those features in the
Flight protocol as we go.
---------
Co-authored-by: Sophie Alpert <git@sophiebits.com>
This lets the client bundle encode Server References without them first
being passed from an RSC payload. Like if you just import `"use server"`
from the client. A bundler could already emit these proxies to be called
on the client but the subtle difference is that those proxies couldn't
be passed back into the server by reference. They have to be registered
with React.
We don't currently implement importing `"use server"` from client
components in the reference implementation. It'd need to expand the
Webpack plugin with a loader that rewrites files with the `"use server"`
in the client bundle.
```
"use server";
export async function action() {
...
}
```
->
```
import {createServerReference} from "react-server-dom-webpack/client";
import {callServer} from "some-router/call-server";
export const action = createServerReference('1234#action', callServer);
```
The technique I use here is that the compiled output has to call
`createServerReference(id, callServer)` with the `$$id` and proxy
implementation. We then return a proxy function that is registered with
a WeakMap to the particular instance of the Flight Client.
This might be hard to implement because it requires emitting module
imports to a specific stateful runtime module in the compiler. A benefit
is that this ensures that this particular reference is locked to a
specific client if there are multiple - e.g. talking to different
servers.
It's fairly arbitrary whether we use a WeakMap technique (like we do on
the client) vs an `$$id` (like we do on the server). Not sure what's
best overall. The WeakMap is nice because it doesn't leak implementation
details that might be abused to consumers. We should probably pick one
and unify.
This adds `encodeReply` to the Flight Client and `decodeReply` to the
Flight Server.
Basically, it's a reverse Flight. It serializes values passed from the
client to the server. I call this a "Reply". The tradeoffs and
implementation details are a bit different so it requires its own
implementation but is basically a clone of the Flight Server/Client but
in reverse. Either through callServer or ServerContext.
The goal of this project is to provide the equivalent serialization as
passing props through RSC to client. Except React Elements and
Components and such. So that you can pass a value to the client and back
and it should have the same serialization constraints so when we add
features in one direction we should mostly add it in the other.
Browser support for streaming request bodies are currently very limited
in that only Chrome supports it. So this doesn't produce a
ReadableStream. Instead `encodeReply` produces either a JSON string or
FormData. It uses a JSON string if it's a simple enough payload. For
advanced features it uses FormData. This will also let the browser
stream things like File objects (even though they're not yet supported
since it follows the same rules as the other Flight).
On the server side, you can either consume this by blocking on
generating a FormData object or you can stream in the
`multipart/form-data`. Even if the client isn't streaming data, the
network does. On Node.js busboy seems to be the canonical library for
this, so I exposed a `decodeReplyFromBusboy` in the Node build. However,
if there's ever a web-standard way to stream form data, or if a library
wins in that space we can support it. We can also just build a multipart
parser that takes a ReadableStream built-in.
On the server, server references passed as arguments are loaded from
Node or Webpack just like the client or SSR does. This means that you
can create higher order functions on the client or server. This can be
tokenized when done from a server components but this is a security
implication as it might be tempting to think that these are not fungible
but you can swap one function for another on the client. So you have to
basically treat an incoming argument as insecure, even if it's a
function.
I'm not too happy with the naming parity:
Encode `server.renderToReadableStream` Decode: `client.createFromFetch`
Decode `client.encodeReply` Decode: `server.decodeReply`
This is mainly an implementation details of frameworks but it's annoying
nonetheless. This comes from that `renderToReadableStream` does do some
"rendering" by unwrapping server components etc. The `create` part comes
from the parity with Fizz/Fiber where you `render` on the server and
`create` a root on the client.
Open to bike-shedding this some more.
---------
Co-authored-by: Josh Story <josh.c.story@gmail.com>
We always look up these references in a map so it doesn't matter what
their value is. It could be a hash for example.
The loaders now encode a single $$id instead of filepath + name.
This changes the react-client-manifest to have a single level. The value
inside the map is still split into module id + export name because
that's what gets looked up in webpack.
The react-ssr-manifest is still two levels because that's a reverse
lookup.
This splits out the Edge and Node implementations of Flight Client into
their own implementations. The Node implementation now takes a Node
Stream as input.
I removed the bundler config from the Browser variant because you're
never supposed to use that in the browser since it's only for SSR.
Similarly, it's required on the server. This also enables generating a
SSR manifest from the Webpack plugin. This is necessary for SSR so that
you can reverse look up what a client module is called on the server.
I also removed the option to pass a callServer from the server. We might
want to add it back in the future but basically, we don't recommend
calling Server Functions from render for initial render because if that
happened client-side it would be a client-side waterfall. If it's never
called in initial render, then it also shouldn't ever happen during SSR.
This might be considered too restrictive.
~This also compiles the unbundled packages as ESM. This isn't strictly
necessary because we only need access to dynamic import to load the
modules but we don't have any other build options that leave
`import(...)` intact, and seems appropriate that this would also be an
ESM module.~ Went with `import(...)` in CJS instead.
Sebastian Markbåge
Josh Story