Preloading Route data

Since version 2.0.0-rc.0

No matter how fast your application is, Front-Commerce helps you to make it feel even faster. By anticipating users' needs and starting long-running tasks before they actually need them, you will improve how fast your users think your site is. This guide explains how to preload data on user intent.

When a website is slow, the first thing that comes to mind is to improve raw metrics like the Speed Index. And while this is definitely useful, we shouldn't overlook the perceived performances. The goal is not to improve the response time, but to better manage the time to make the user think that the website is fast.

For instance, when a user is navigating a catalog, on a desktop, they will hover over the product before clicking on it. Thus, we can start loading the product page as soon as the user hovers the product element, instead of waiting for the click. This can seem like a micro-optimization, but it definitely improves how fast the user thinks your site is.

How to preload data?

The main idea is to launch Apollo requests twice:

• when you think that the user will need the data
• when you are displaying the data

By doing this, you will first warm up Apollo's cache and this cache will be reused when you display your data. But this can be tedious. This is why in Front-Commerce, we have added a HOC that will do this: web/core/apollo/graphqlWithPreload.

Let's see how it works by upgrading adding preload to a product component:

import React from "react";
-import { graphql } from "react-apollo";
+import graphqlWithPreload from "web/core/apollo/graphqlWithPreload";

const Product = props => {
  return <div>{props.product.name}</div>;
};

const EnhancedProduct = (
-  graphql(ProductQuery, {
+  graphqlWithPreload(ProductQuery, {
    options: props => ({
      variables: {
        sku: props.sku
      }
-    })
+    }),
+    preloadOptions: params => ({
+      variables: {
+        sku: params.sku
+      }
+    })
  })
)(Product);

We swap the graphql HOC that is usually used when requesting data with graphqlWithPreload. The only difference is that we add preloadOptions. This option should return the same object as in options. The only difference is that options takes the props as in React as parameters whereas preloadOptions uses params.

The params used here are actually the params passed to the static preload property that the graphqlWithPreload HOC creates.

EnhancedProduct.preload(params);

This means that you are responsible to recreate the params each time you call the preload function.

For instance, let's say that we want to preload the product with SKU VD12 when you click on a button. This means that you will write something like:

const PreloadProductButton = () => {
  return (
    <button
      onClick={() => {
        EnhancedProduct.preload({ sku: "VD12" });
      }}
    >
      Preload product
    </button>
  );
};

This is a very contrived example. However, you could imagine doing this on whatever event: hover, focus, click or even IntersectionObserver.

danger

if you have some HOC that you are using before graphqlWithPreload, you won't have any preload static property on your final component. You will need to hoist the static properties at the top level.

-import { withProps } from "recompose";
+import { compose, hoistStatics, withProps } from "recompose";
const EnhancedComponent = compose(
-  withRouter,
-  withProps(() => /* ... */),
+  hoistsStatics(
+    compose(
+      withRouter,
+      withProps(() => /* ... */)
+    )
+  )
graphqlWithPreload(Query)
)(BaseComponent)

How to preload routes?

However, in some cases you don't really know which component you should preload. This is the case for the url: /venia-dresses for instance. If you are familiar with Magento Venia's sample data, you will recognize that it is a category. But you may not know which component is actually used to display it.

This is why we have implemented preloads on links too. This is possible with the React hook theme/modules/Router/usePreload that will give you a preload function to load the components and data for a given link.

note

This hook is useful if you want to have custom events to preload data. However, the default links in Front-Commerce already use the usePreload hook and will preload pages before the user needs them. This documentation is here to explain how this works under the hood.

import { usePreload } from "theme/modules/Router/usePreload";

const PreloadVeniaDresses = () => {
  const preload = usePreload();

  return (
    <button
      onClick={() => {
        preload("/venia-dresses");
      }}
    >
      Preload product
    </button>
  );
};

If you inspect your network dev tools in your browser, you should see some requests appearing when you click on the button. They preload the data needed to display the /venia-dresses page.

Under the hood, it looks into the .front-commerce/themes.es.js file generated at build time from your theme/routes folders (cf. Routing documentation). If the URL matches one of the routes available here, it will preload the component and then preload its data using the preload static property of the component.

This is why if you have trouble preloading data on one of your custom routes, you first need to make sure that the preload property is available. If it is not, please refer to the first part of this documentation.

Additionally, it will also preload the data needed for the layouts around the matched route. This means that you can also set a preload static property on layouts and inner layouts.

How to preload routes with parameters?

You can now preload static pages such as /contact or /home. But what about /product/:sku or /my-seo-friendly-product-url?

The usePreload hook will take care of this for you by calling the preload static property of your component with an object containing:

• match: a React Router object that describes the currently matched route.
  • params (object): Key/value pairs parsed from the URL corresponding to the dynamic segments of the path
  • isExact (boolean): true if the entire URL was matched (no trailing characters)
  • path (string): The path pattern used to match. Useful for building nested <Route>s
  • url (string): The matched portion of the URL. Useful for building nested <Link>s
• location: a React Router object that describes the url that you passed to the preload function (/venia-dresses in the example above)

These two parameters allow you to almost expect to have the same properties between the options and preloadOptions functions of graphqlWithPreload.

For instance, let's consider that the URL /product/:sku should display the following component.

import React from "react";
import graphqlWithPreload from "web/core/apollo/graphqlWithPreload";

const Product = (props) => {
  return <div>{props.product.name}</div>;
};

const EnhancedProduct = graphqlWithPreload(ProductQuery, {
  options: (props) => ({
    variables: {
      sku: props.match.params.sku,
    },
  }),
  preloadOptions: (params) => ({
    variables: {
      sku: params.match.params.sku,
    },
  }),
})(Product);

Then this means that if you call preload("/product/VD12"), in params.match.params.sku (line 17) you will have the value VD12.

If you need search parameters in the URL (e.g. ?param=value), it will be available at params.location.search.

Front-Commerce Fast Mode

To conclude, if you want your application to feel even faster to your users, you need to:

• add a preload static property to your routes thanks to graphqlWithPreload
• use usePreload hook through the default Link component in Front-Commerce or manually in your own events.

You can tweak how the usePreload works in links by adding a preload property in your config/website.js.