Cann't access `atomWithStorage` value in spa initial

[Innei]

Cann't access `atomWithStorage` value in spa initial

[jaens]

I just spent an hour debugging this exact issue - I have a very normal SPA which uses localStorage to store an auth token, migrated it to use atomWithStorage thinking it would be a drop-in, and suddenly the first render of a component always reads the uninitialized value for some reason (which causes the component to throw an exception, since it needs it to start fetching data...).

This unintuitive behaviour is not even really documented anywhere... truly a terrible first experience with Jotai.

@dai-shi could you at least please explain why getOnInit is not the default for storage atoms? "more people would get confused?" Confused about what? I am pretty confused about the way it is right now... How is reading an uninitialized value, but only on the first render anything besides confusing?

I think there are no storage items in the entire app which would be usable with getOnInit: false...

Reading between the lines, this seems to be about SSR somehow - but the majority of React apps do not even use SSR, as far as I see.

Seems to me that the API is fundamentally broken if the default is only usable in SSR and unusable in SPA (or vice versa, if the default would be switched to true). Perhaps splitting the API behaviour for these two very different use cases would lead to less confusion...

[dai-shi]

That said, we should change unstable_getOnInit to getOnInit some time soon.

So, thanks for the feedback. Wish to get more feedback on it. How do you like the name getOnInit?

[jiangmaniu]

The same problem is that the value of storage cannot be obtained at the time of initialization.

[Innei]

The same problem is that the value of storage cannot be obtained at the time of initialization.

The current solution is to use unstable_getOnInit: true. I think getOnInit should be a reasonable behavior in non-ssr scenarios.

[dai-shi]

It's our design choice to have getOnInit false by default.

[Innei]

That said, we should change unstable_getOnInit to getOnInit some time soon.

So, thanks for the feedback. Wish to get more feedback on it. How do you like the name getOnInit?

Sounds great

[ViktorQvarfordt]

After a lot of confusion I ended up here. I would prefer if the default was true. At least I would expect this to be clearly documented an not hidden. In the docs no default is described. Cheers!

[dai-shi]

It's intentionally false by default. Otherwise, more people would get confused. (which was the case in v1).

Would you mind opening a PR to improve the docs?

[ViktorQvarfordt]

Thank you for sharing. I share your frustration.

I believe the reason is to make it work well with hydration for SSR. But I view that as an opt-in, not the other way around. It would make sense for me if the defaults were tuned for code running in browsers. Most of my projects are SPAs without SSR (bacause content is behind login).

[dai-shi]

could you at least please explain why getOnInit is not the default for storage atoms?

It was the default behavior in v1 and we received many issues reported. It makes more sense to render initial value first and update with storage value next, and gives less trouble. Which is default can be controversial, but we've been there and done that.

[henrikvilhelmberglund]

Was a bit confused by this too, it could be mentioned in the docs that the default is false.

[dai-shi]

Thanks for the feedback! Can you please open a PR to avoid such confusion?

[zhylmzr]

I'm a jotai newbie, while checking the official example, I found that the persistent state theme blink when refreshing the page (in my local editing environment. It doesn't blink in the playground), by printing I realized that it's because it doesn't get the initial value. But I found that in v1 version it will get the initial value, here is an example using v1: https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/brave-mountain-wv2zrt

Screenshot

[dai-shi]

See #2391