SSG: Make full SSG approach more obvious and easier to configure

[gionkunz]

Dear maintainers :-) First of all, I really enjoy working with AnalogJs and it's very cool to have Angular catching up in the SSR / SSG domain.

My use-cases are mostly pure SSG, so I usually go with static: true. I'm using the Server-Side Data fetching with a co-located .server.ts file in the pages folder.

I found it a bit un-intuitive, that now my statically generated site is still trying to call the server API to fetch the data. I would have expected that fetched data is automatically included in the pre-render as data similar to useAsyncData from Nuxt or getStaticProps in Next.

Instead I needed to find out which API calls are performed on the given route (in my case the route data-fetch in (home).server.ts) and add the API route to the pre-render routes. I can see that this might be desirable in SSR / Hybrid SSR situations, however for SSG and ISR, bundling the server-side fetched data into the client output is quite essential. Especially for a full SSG framework, which I believe AnalogJs promotes static: true for, automatically pre-rendering API routes, or at least the Server-Side Data fetching configured in .server.ts files, would be great.

.
├── app.component.ts
├── app.config.server.ts
├── app.config.ts
├── components
└── pages
    ├── (home).page.ts
    └── (home).server.ts

I needed to configure the generated Server-Side Data fetching API Url in the prerender configuration to make this work purely static:

analog({
  static: true,
  prerender: {
    routes: async () => [
      '/',
      '/api/_analog/pages/-home-',
    ],
  },
}),

It could also very well be that I just missed something and this Idea is just a Q&A with a stupid question :-P

Cheers
Gion

[brandonroberts]

Thanks @gionkunz. It's an interesting use case for sure. Server-side data fetching implies that you're going to ship a server along with your static assets to handle requests after the first load.

I did land a fix here for using transfer state on initial load.

#1396

There could be a way to always pull from transfer state for SSG.