better-next-action

This is a forked version of the next-safe-action package. See original source here: https://github.com/TheEdoRan/next-safe-action The original package is licensed under the MIT license.

This is for internal use. But feel free to use it too.

What changed?

In the future I possibly will fork the docs as well and make the corresponding changes.

Aliases for status-checking

For convinience I added boolean values to the client hook that can be used instead of checking against the status variable.

// action as a client hook
const myAction = useBetterAction(action);

// aliases
myAction.isIdle; // equals myAction.status === "idle"
myAction.isExecuting; // equals myAction.status === "executing"
myAction.hasSucceeded; // equals myAction.status === "hasSucceeded"
myAction.hasErrored; // equals myAction.status === "hasErrored"

Curry the action handler

In the original package the created client takes two arguments: the schema and the implementation. To establish the new features i wanted to introduce, the client now is a function that takes the schema as first argument and an optional options object as the second one. It then returns another function that takes the implementation as argument. In the implementation callback, the input and context (and other new things) aren't seperate arguments anymore, but one object.

// before
const action = createAction(
  z.object({ id: z.string() }),
  async (input, ctx) => {
    // ... implementation
  }
);

// after
const action = createAction(z.object({ id: z.string() }), {
  // ... options
})(async ({ input, ctx }) => {
  // ... implementation
});

Add optional custom errors that can be checked with typesafety

I always wanted to be able to throw some simple error messages that I can check for in the onError callback with automatic typesafety. One can now add those custom error messages in the added option argument in the action-client as an array. The implementation callback then exposes a function error which you can use to throw a defined message. On the client you can then check for the error message via the first error argument in the onError callback.

// defining action
const addUserAction = createAction(z.object({ email: z.string().email() }), {
  // define the error messages
  errors: ["EMAIL_ALREADY_USED"],
})(async ({ ctx, input, error }) => {
  // check if user with given email exists
  if (user) {
    error("EMAIL_ALREADY_USED"); // throws an error
  }
});

// on the client
const addUser = useBetterAction(addUserAction, {
  onError: (e) => {
    if (e.actionError === "EMAIL_ALREADY_USED") {
      // ... handle error
    }
  },
});

Add custom options for middleware.

!!! CAUTION: The implementation uses two @ts-ignores, so i don't know if there could potentially be a way to break this feature typewise but i will just ignore that for my own sanity !!!

I was missing the option to add custom information to an action (kinda like the meta field in tRPC), which then could be used in the middleware. That's why i added the possibility to define them directly in the middleware function.

// example: add custom field to check if the user is authenticated every time the action gets called

const createAction = createBetterActionClient({
  // just explicitly type the first argument of the middleware function
  async middleware(opts?: { secured?: boolean }) {
    const session = await getSession();

    if (opts?.secured && !session?.user) {
      // when the secured flag is set and the user is not logged in: throw error
      throw new Error("Unauthorized");
    }

    // return the context in the known way
    return {
      //...
    };
  },
});

const addItemAction = createAction(z.object({ name: z.string() }), {
  // ... now all options defined in the middleware function are exposed in this object
  secured: true,
})(async ({ ctx, input }) => {
  // ...
});

Add executeAsync

In some cases i wanted to wait for the result of the executing hook but that was not possible in the original package. The function will only throw if an unknown error occurs. In every other case the function will return an object with a key "ok" which is either true, which reveals the returned data or false, which reveals the possible errors. I decided to do that because you can still check for the custom custom action errors in a typesafe way. If an error would be thrown, one couldn't directly infer the error from it, without any additional functions.

const myAction = useBetterAction(action);

async function execute() {
  const res = await myAction.executeAsync();
}

No useOptimisticAction

I currently don't use it and was to lazy to get busy with implementing it with the new features.

TO-DO

• [ ] useOptimisticAction

License

better-next-action is released under the MIT license.