Invalidating entries based on contents / metadata of the entries

[sazzer]

I'm using TanStack Query in my webapp to wrap all of my REST API calls, and this is working great.

One thing I'd like to be able to do is support the HTTP Cache Groups proposal. Basically this means that some API calls will indicate that the returned resource belongs to one or more "Cache Groups", and other API calls can indicate that certain "Cache Groups" should be invalidated.

I can already achieve this using the query keys, but the query key needs to be known before the API call is made, whereas the cache groups here are only known based on the response.

It seems to me that I can achieve this if I can:

• Indicate in the query function (or similar) some metadata to associate with the entry.
• Have some way to find entries based on this metadata and invalidate the like that.

I can do this with an external store easily enough, but that just feels very hacky and not a good solution.

Is there anything like this that can be done right now within TanStack Query itself?

Cheers

[sazzer]

It looks like queryClient.getQueryCache().findAll() would probably work for this, if there was some way to get some metadata into that which can be search against. I can't work out how to do this.

Alternatively, I can just use queryClient.getQueriesData({}), iterate over all of the data and interrogate the stored values for each. That depends on the stored values all working in a suitable way, and will become problematic as the query data grows though. But it does at least work...

[TkDodo]

yeah if that information is part of the response, the best way is likely to have it as part of data. We do have a meta field but it’s not really meant to be written from the queryFn

[sazzer]

I did get something working, but it felt a bit hacky.

The solution was:

• Have the queryFn return the raw HTTP response, and then have a select function that converts this into my richer entity for use in my app.
• Have a query cache subscriber that reacts to all the success events and builds a mapping between queryKey to cache groups. (I've not done it yet but I also need to be able to evict from this mapping as appropriate)
• Have a hook that can take a set of cache group names and will work out the set of appropriate query keys and invalidate them all.

It was just a shame that all of this had to be built outside of TanStack Query instead of somehow being able to work within it.

Cheers