Support for initial value

[vastamaki]

Adding a support for initial value would help to simplify some components at least in our case. Default value does not work in our case, because we want to set the value to null sometimes and in that case nuqs will fallback to the default value. We'd like to have initial value, so we don't need to use useEffect or similar approach to "initialize" the state.

[franky47]

I was sure we already had a discussion about this topic, but it must have been on another platform.

TL;DR: no, the URL is the source of truth, so an initial value doesn't make sense: the value is whatever the URL contains (or doesn't contain, and therefore returns null or falls back to the default value if specified).

You can skip the default value and have the hook return null when there is no query in the URL, but if your use-case warrants that a given value in the URL explicitly maps to null, then nuqs isn't able to do that.

[vastamaki]

Thanks! Quick question on the best way to handle this:

We’ve got a dropdown where the value should be null by default, unless the user has set a default in their settings. Right now, we’re using a useEffect to apply that default (if it exists), and a separate initialized flag to make sure we don’t fetch data before the value is set.

It works, but the pattern feels a bit more complicated than it should be. Is there a cleaner way to handle this?

[franky47]

Do you have a specific code sample?

I guess it depends on how/when you have access to that setting compared to when the component that needs that state is rendered.

[vastamaki]

The value is stored in the React context. I ended up creating a helper function for navigation that applies the setting value to the URL, it seemed like the simplest and cleanest approach.

[franky47]

And likely the correct one: once a user has loaded their preference, their URL should become shareable for others to load and have the same content.