Short circuit when a navigation only updates location state

[Synvox]

Ran into an unexpected behavior today calling navigate:

function setValue(value) {
  navigate(
    location.pathname,
    {
      replace: true,
      state: {
        ...location.state,
        key: value
      },
    }
  )
}

Every time I called this function, my loaders would rerun. This makes sense because it's a navigation, but it doesn't actually navigate to a separate page. I wonder if this should short circuit like updating the location hash:

https://github.com/remix-run/react-router/blob/main/packages/router/router.ts#L1152

Thoughts?

[brophdawg11]

Related issue asking for the exact opposite behavior: #12571 🙃

Cross-posting my comment from there:

As for the changing state, that's not currently exposed to loaders so they wouldn't return a different value anyway even if they did re-run. Any reason you can't use search params instead of history state? That would cause loaders to re-run and you'd have access to the new state in the loader.

Even if we did expose state to loaders, it's not really enough to say "state change should trigger loaders" because here's an #10143 asking for the exact opposite behavior, so there's not going to be a one-size-fits all solution that works for everyone.

I would recommend we use that existing proposal to discuss the possibility of adding state as a param to loaders/actions (and figuring out if this applies in a serializable way for SSR) and then you could opt in or out of running loaders on state change using a custom dataStrategy. Feel free to comment on your use case over there and if that gets enough traction it can be considered.