What's the preferred way to deal with intermittent network issues?

[s992]

We have a few users on fairly poor internet connections and as a result we see some requests failing with network errors (as expected). When this happens, it can result in partially incorrect data displayed due to react-query continuing to serve data from the last successful request.

Note: This is not about fully offline support, but rather the occasional network "blip."

I have two questions:

1. Is there a config option that will blow away cached data for a given query when a network error is encountered while fetching new data for that query?
2. If not, what would be the best way to ensure we clear out cached data when a network error occurs?

Thanks in advance!

[TkDodo]

We have a few users on fairly poor internet connections and as a result we see some requests failing with network errors

We mostly handle this with retries. I would maybe continue to do more retries when there are network errors, and you can also use the returned failureCount and failureReason to display information to the user if that is happening.

Is there a config option that will blow away cached data for a given query when a network error is encountered while fetching new data for that query?

no, but you can just catch errors in the queryFn, check if they are network errors, and return null in those cases. Then, null will be cached as a “successful request”. To re-enable automatic fetches and not cache that data too long, if you’re having a custom staleTime, I would then implement a custom staleTime function that sets staleTime to zero when null is being cached:

staleTime: (query) => query.state.data === null ? 0 : myDefaultStaleTime

[s992]

Thank you!