Error handling best practices with Server Actions

[round stag]

I'm using server actions directly as form actions in my project to benefit from progressive enhancement (i.e. the form works even without having JavaScript enabled). In this sort of a use case, what best practices are there for throwing and catching errors from the Server Action? For example, input validation errors.

• I was initially thinking of error boundaries, but it seems that you can't really really include any information in the errors, as those are stripped out in prod
• Another thought I had was redirecting back to the form, but with query parameters that indicate the error (e.g. ?error=noEmail)
• Finally, I thought about returning data from the action, but as far as I know there's no way to consume this data without running JS on the client and calling the server action that way

Are there any best practices around this? Anyone handled a similar case in their project?

[opaque rampart]

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[round stag]

Bump 🙂

[round stag]

Bumping this again

[scarlet willow]

There is no error handling for server actions yet. The React team is still working on it. If you call them outside of form actions I suggest returning Either monads in case you're familiar with them or alternatively simple responses using a discriminator like:

type ActionResponse =
  | {
      kind: 'success'
    }
  | {
      kind: 'error',
      description: '...'
      // w/e you need
    }
  ;

[round stag]

Yeah, calling them outside server actions would make it easy, but I'd like to keep the form working without JS as well

[scarlet willow]

In case of form actions old school query params are working just as fine like we did in PHP decades ago

[round stag]

😄

I have fond memories of that time, maybe it's time to embrace it again

glad to hear the React team has plans in this area though

looking forward to that

[scarlet willow]

There is nothing wrong with that approach I'd say

[round stag]

yeah, it works and is relatively low tech

thanks Near!