Data Mode type safety

[jaskp]

Hi, I'm very grateful for the work that's been done on React Router, particularly backporting Remix features to Data Mode!

Are there any plans to backport some of the type safety, too? I'm not sure how much of Framework Mode's typegen logic could be reused, but I think it would be very handy even if at least a strongly-typed href function could be inferred from the arguments to createBrowserRouter.

In userland it's common to implement a custom type-safe path builder with nested objects/methods, but it basically duplicates the route tree. And it gets hard to read when trying to use this path builder in deeply nested RouteObjects, because it typically returns absolute paths.

Any thoughts or even patterns that make a userland fix nicer? Or any packages that do this? I couldn't find any that infers from RouteObjects? Thanks!

[sergiodxa]

Type-safety features are only for Framework Mode, adding them to Data Mode will transform Data Mode in framework mode anyway, e.g. for href you will need routes.ts file which implies the Vite plugin and also needs the route modules, and from that point you will build Framework Mode again.

Why not use Framework Mode? You can even disable SSR if that's the reason to use Data Mode.

[jaskp]

Could you elaborate on why type safety would transform Data Mode to Framework Mode? In principle, I don't see a blocker for inferring the types from the argument passed to createBrowserRouter, I actually found a package that does just that, but it's for RR6 and abandoned. If the "blocker" is that the maintainers simply don't want to maintain type-safety for Data Mode, then that's an understandable decision. It's just that since there is RSC support in Data Mode, I was under the impression that features are developed for the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, I don't think this is related to the question, but since you asked why I'm not using Framework Mode, it's because I'm working on a web extension, which means I need several HTML files in the bundle (such as one for a popup, another for a sidepanel, etc.) and I also need a HashRouter within each of them for a reasonable UX (i.e. so that refreshing doesn't break the page).
I believe this setup isn't easily achievable in Framework Mode, but I would happily be proven wrong, as I would love to utilize RR's prerendering 😄