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by Jcampuzano2 1588 days ago
To answer this question - There is nothing stopping you from fetching on the client still while using remix or from for example wrapping your app with a provider where you can store cached client side data.

Page transitions happen on the client when you have JS enabled so that data will still be in memory if done as such.

But I do want to mention that the specific use case you mention is not what 80%+ of apps are doing and I think you're being a bit unfair. Remix ABSOLUTELY does get rid of most needs for a client side state management solution. Most apps are fetching data and displaying it primarily on page load/route transitions. Or for instance on query param change for paginated data. This is the use case Remix targets, and it does a fantastic job of simplifying the code for this and making it much faster.

For those cases where you really do need to do client side data fetching you are free to do so.

1 comments

> Remix ABSOLUTELY does get rid of most needs for a client side state management solution. Most apps are fetching data and displaying it primarily on page load/route transitions. Or for instance on query param change for paginated data. This is the use case Remix targets, and it does a fantastic job of simplifying the code for this and making it much faster.

But do these use cases require a state management library in the first place? Can you provide an example where using React Component state is not sufficient - a state management library is needed - and then Remix removes this need?

Remix co-author here. Infinite scroll/pagination is a great way to test the limits of a web framework!

Remix doesn't ship an infinite scroll/pagination set of components so it's up to apps to make sure that state is still there when the user clicks back. If the state is still there, Remix's scroll restoration will work.

You could either manage your own global state for this, but I like to use "location state" which is our API into the browser's built in `history.state`.

There are various ways to use it (declaratively, imperatively, etc.), but simplest way to explain is to imagine a "Load more" button that's really just a link like this:

`<Link to="?page=2" state={{ data }} />`

Your Remix loader would load page 2 from the url search param and your component would concat that onto `location.state.data` (the previous entries from the initial location). This renders the old data and the new data together.

Location state, unlike typical "global state", automatically persists across both refreshes and back/forward button clicks, but dies with the session, so scroll restoration will work as expected even for a refresh! Built in browser APIs tend to be a bit more resilient than storing stuff in application memory, they also keep your bundle smaller.

I don't know where the demo is, but I helped somebody at some point implement this without needing to ship a global state container for server-supplied data. Just made a note to make an example and put it our repo :)

If we're talking "load more" a much simpler way to do it is to consider how you'd do it old school with no JS. Just return all pages according to the search param, so "?page=3" would return all three pages. More kB over the network, but far easier to implement. There's even a product reason to do it this way: when you load more you automatically update the comment counts/points of each entry, so maybe it's worth it.

Great question!

> I like to use "location state" which is our API into the browser's built in `history.state` ... Location state, unlike typical "global state", automatically persists across both refreshes and back/forward button clicks, but dies with the session, so scroll restoration will work as expected even for a refresh! Built in browser APIs tend to be a bit more resilient than storing stuff in application memory, they also keep your bundle smaller.

This sounds great! I never thought of using history state to store arbitrary data. Thanks for the explanation!