useAbortableEffect

React hook to work with abortable effects in a safe way.

An effect started with useAbortableEffect can be aborted at any time and will be aborted when the React component is unmounted.

While some libraries like axios and Bluebird support aborting effects, and it wouldn't be too complicated to abort then when a component is unmounted, useAbortableEffect does this automatically, which I think is safer, and usign the standard AbortController. This means effects used with useAbortableEffect can be used anywhere: in a redux store, outside of the React lifecycle, etc, without any dependency.

More importantly, with just useEffect you'd likely need some way for your effect error handler to check the mount status of your component in order to prevent setting state or other unintended work when the abort occurs in the context of unmounting the component, which is a bad practice.

I considered accepting a callback to handle the abort scenario, instead of throwing an error, but keeping it like the standard makes the code more portable and durable, at the cost of ergonomics.

Example

This is a TypeScript example.

import React, { FunctionComponent, useState } from "react";

import useAbortableEffect from "./useAbortableEffect";

type DownloadStatus =
  | { status: "Initial" | "InProgress" | "Complete" }
  | { status: "Error"; errorMessage: string };

const assertNever = (unexpected: never): never => {
  throw new Error(`Unexpected value: ${unexpected}`);
};

const LargeVideoDownloader: FunctionComponent<{}> = () => {
  const downloadEffect = useAbortableEffect(signal =>
    fetch("some_url", { signal })
  );
  const [downloadStatus, setDownloadStatus] = useState<DownloadStatus>({
    status: "Initial"
  });

  const startDownloading = async () => {
    setDownloadStatus({ status: "InProgress" });
    try {
      await downloadEffect.start();
    } catch (e) {
      const errorMessage = e instanceof Error ? e.message : e.toString();
      // Here we would capture the abort as well as any other error.
      // You can tell the abort case if you need to by checking its name:
      // e.name === 'AbortError'
      setDownloadStatus({ status: "Error", errorMessage });
      return;
    }
    setDownloadStatus({ status: "Complete" });
  };

  switch (downloadStatus.status) {
    case "Initial":
      return (
        <p>
          Ready?<button onClick={startDownloading}>Go!</button>
        </p>
      );
    case "InProgress":
      return (
        <p>
          Downloading... <button onClick={downloadEffect.abort}>Cancel</button>
        </p>
      );
    case "Complete":
      return (
        <p>
          Download complete! :){" "}
          <button onClick={downloadEffect.abort}>Download again because yes</button>
        </p>
      );
    case "Error":
      return <p>Error while downloading: {downloadStatus.errorMessage}. <button onClick={startDownloading}>Retry</button></p>;
    default:
      return assertNever(downloadStatus);
  }
};

export default LargeVideoDownloader;