Remix fetcher and action gripes

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Style Pass

2024-09-20 09:30:04

We use Remix at Val Town and I’ve been a pretty big fan of it: it has felt like a very responsible project that is mostly out of the way for us. That said, the way it works with forms is still a real annoyance. I’ve griped about this in an indirect, vague manner, and this document is an attempt to make those gripes more actionable and concrete.

Remix embraces traditional forms, which means that it also embraces the FormData object in JavaScript and the application/x-www-form-urlencoded encoding, which is the default for <form> elements which use POST. This is great for backwards-compatibility but, like we’ve known about for years, it just sucks, for well-established reasons:

Conform already preprocesses empty values to undefined. Add .default() to your schema to define a default value that will be returned instead.

So let’s say you have a form in your application for writing a README. Someone writes their readme, tries to edit it and deletes everything from the textarea, hits submit, and now the value of the input, on the server side, is undefined instead of a string. Not great! You can see why conform would do this, because of how limited FormData is, but still, it requires us to write workarounds and Zod schemas that are anticipating Conform, FormData, and our form elements all working in this awkward way.