Revalidating data using mutate in SWR - Which should I use?

Question

In my app every time the user creates a new album the post request response responds with a list of the updated list of albums.

To provide a better user experience, I wanted the user to see the new content in the app without having to refresh the page.

I'm aware of the existence of SWR's mutate, but so far, I couldn't make it work.

I tried to set a 1000ms refreshInterval in my hook, but I wanted to know how to do it by using the mutate. Here's what I tried:

SWR hook

const fetcher = async (url: string, param: string) => {
    const res = await fetch(url + param);
    
   return res.json();
};


const { data, error } = useSWR(
 ["/api/albums/list?id=", appUser.id],
  (url, params) => fetcher(url, params)
);

Inside the createAlbum function:

const data = await response.json();

mutate("/api/albums/list", data.newAlbums, false);

I would be happy to get some feedback.

Answer 1

Your code is almost correct, the issue lies in the fact that SWR internally hashes the keys used for queries/mutation. Therefore, the key used by the mutate function is simply not registered in the cache.

Using global mutate

To solve this problem using the mutate function exported directly by swr, it will suffice just to pass the same key to both useSWR and mutate.

mutate(["/api/albums/list?id=", appUser.id]);

This will invalidate the cache for the hashed key. The data retrieved from your original hook will go stale, and will therefore be fetched again.

Using bound mutate

Another option is to take advantage of the mutate function bound to swr's key.

const { data, error, mutate } = useSWR(
   ["/api/albums/list?id=", appUser.id],
   (url, params) => fetcher(url, params)
);

/*
 * Now you can just call `mutate()` without specifying `key` argument
 */

docs: https://github.com/vercel/swr#bound-mutate

Specifying a refresh interval

For completeness, as you said, one other option would be just to set the value of refreshInterval prop. Forcing a refetch when desired:

const { data, error } = useSWR(
   ["/api/albums/list?id=", appUser.id],
   (url, params) => fetcher(url, params),
   {
     refreshInterval: 1000, 
   }
);