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Advice on optimizing custom URL validator for internal links in Sanity Studio

17 replies
Last updated: Aug 21, 2022
Any advice on a custom URL validator? I want to ensure that any internal links point to published slugs. It works, but slowly. I keep getting this warning:

Custom validator at linkGroups[_key=="721a4739faa3"].links[_key=="e61f9228310a"].linkUrl has taken more than 5000ms to respond

here’s the code:


import client from "part:@sanity/base/client";

const listAllSlugs = async () => {
  const slugsList = await client
    .withConfig({ apiVersion: "2021-10-21" })
    // require slug and exclude unpublished drafts
    .fetch(
      `*[defined(slug.current) && !(_id in path("drafts.**"))][].slug.current`
    );

  return slugsList;
};

export const validateLink = (url) => {
 
  // if it's an internal link
  if (url.startsWith("/")) {
    // remove # and ?
    const clean = url.split("#")[0].split("?")[0];

    return listAllSlugs().then((allSlugs) => {
      return allSlugs.includes(clean)
        ? true
        : "Does not match any published slugs";
    });
  }
  // ... test against http url patterns ...
};
Aug 20, 2022, 12:26 AM
I’ve got many links nested in groups on this document, so they’re all doing this slow query. Could I preload the slugsList once and make it available as a variable, or maybe get it into the validator’s
document
parameter?
Aug 20, 2022, 12:41 AM
May I ask how many different slugs it needs to evaluate? Are we talking 50 or 10,000?
Aug 20, 2022, 12:48 AM
user S
50
Aug 20, 2022, 12:50 AM
there are 50-100 documents with slugs, and maybe 50 links to validate in this one document
Aug 20, 2022, 12:51 AM
I have to step away for a bit, thank you very much for your thoughts on this!
Aug 20, 2022, 12:52 AM
That's super weird that it's that high, I feel.
I am running something similar that depends upon a thousand math comparisons (color hexes) gathered across about 200 docs and it comes back in a second.

Is it the same experience in any browser?


https://www.sanity.io/docs/validation#9e69d5db6f72 That's the closest kind of example I could find that's using the built-ins.
I wonder if there's another approach, like counting lengths of things that satisfy queries and comparing that so you don't have to bother with strings. I'll think some more on it while you're away.
Aug 20, 2022, 12:53 AM
just tested and it’s also the live studio, not just local. I’m on the free tier but i haven’t approached any limits yet
Aug 20, 2022, 12:57 AM
I don't have any reason to believe you'd be throttled for being free. It also looks like the service itself is doing okay: https://www.sanity-status.com/
Do you have another browser you can test in just to narrow down the culprits?

Is there anything of applicable use in the example I linked as far as other approaches?
Aug 20, 2022, 2:08 AM
Validators run on every keystroke. You might not want to query your entire dataset every time. So I would advise caching your response.
Aug 20, 2022, 8:30 AM
user F
One think I was thinking about is if they were inline blocks that were made to point at something that existed at the time that they'd necessarily have to exist when added. I mention it because this sounds a bit like a broken link checker after the fact. It's not programmatic to use your eyes to see complaints about references but it also might make more sense as an additional view rather than validation.
If it was kept as a validation, do you think it's possible to do a custom input component where the validation assumes a default value of true with useState, run a call after the promise returns once they've stopped typing and only switch then if it finds an issue?
Aug 20, 2022, 12:29 PM
user S
The fetch returns MUCH faster on Safari than on Chrome. I have no idea why.

user F
Are there cache options for Sanity client .fetch that I’m not finding, or an idiomatic way you’d approach this? I’ve had big improvements by implementing the following:
export const validateLink = (cachedSlugs) => (url) => {
  // cachedSlugs is declared in the document schema that calls validateLink
  
  // ...

  // if it's an internal link
  if (url.startsWith("/")) {
    const cleanUrl = url.split("#")[0].split("?")[0];

    if (cachedSlugs) {
      // use the cache if it exists
      return cachedSlugs.includes(cleanUrl)
        ? true
        : "Does not match any published slugs";
    } else {
      return listAllSlugs().then((allSlugs) => {
        // cache results
        cachedSlugs = allSlugs;

        return allSlugs.includes(cleanUrl)
          ? true
          : "Does not match any published slugs";
      });
    }
  }
  // ...
};
Aug 21, 2022, 1:19 AM
user M
Yeah one of the exhausting things about any kind of web dev is there are so many variables. Browser, OS, device, time of day, network conditions, browser extensions, ISP, etc. I can't account for that either off the top of my head. In my experience on Windows Chrome is the slowest, but it shouldn't be for that sort of thing (believe it or not, on my machine, Edge is the fastest and it isn't even close).
Until she sees the message, if I had to guess, she might be talking about memoizing or useCallback; I see the latter a lot in some official examples; my understanding is if the function is always going to return the same conditions under the same circumstances (and given the same dependencies) it keeps it in memory for re-use then.
Aug 21, 2022, 2:12 AM
user S
Could you possibly share a link to one of those examples where you saw memoization? I’d love to compare with that I came up with.
Aug 21, 2022, 2:18 AM
I’m pretty happy with this outcome using lodash
_memoize
. I’m passing in the document ID just to to pull a fresh slug list when switching documents, in case a user is navigating around adding new slugs.

import _ from "lodash";

const getAllSlugs = _.memoize(async (docId) => {
  const allSlugs = await client
    .withConfig({ apiVersion: "2021-10-21" })
    .fetch(
      `*[defined(slug.current) && !(_id in path("drafts.**"))][].slug.current`
    )
    .then((r) => {
      return r;
    });

  return allSlugs;
});

export const validateLink = (url, { document }) => {
  return getAllSlugs(document._id).then((allSlugs) => {
    const cleanUrl = url.split("#")[0].split("?")[0];

    return allSlugs.includes(cleanUrl)
      ? true
      : "Does not match any published slugs";
  });
};
Aug 21, 2022, 3:26 AM
user M
Sure! The most recent one I saw is actually from the v3 beta docs in an example involving a custom input, but the concept should still apply: https://beta.sanity.io/docs/learn/custom-input-component/patching-to-the-content-lake#adding-performance-optimization-with-usecallback
Aug 21, 2022, 3:34 AM
If anyone else is reading this, lodash / underscore are so freaking cool. I forgot how much I valued them and how much they bailed me out with custom stuff in WordPress, like making a table of contents sticky column because I could have it track all the page headings and find the one nearest my scroll position calculating distances to know which side nav menu item to highlight. It was crazy fast given all it had to do.
Aug 21, 2022, 3:43 AM
lollll you just reminded me i really should memoize almost that exact function I have going on my site!!
Aug 21, 2022, 3:44 AM

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