Ability to revalidate the literal route segment

[nrsimha]

Goals

To be able to revalidate the literal route segment (e.g. post/123456) without need of revalidating all products

Non-Goals

No response

Background

Let say site has 1M of post. If one post is edited and all other are unchanged it will be nice to be able to revalidate just one which has been edited and keep remaining 999,999 without change and without need of rebuild them again.

Currently revalidatePath doesn't support this, so revalidatePath('/post/[id]') will revalidate all 1M of posts.

Proposal

Add support to revalidatePath to support literal route segment (e.g. post/123456) to be revalidated. So when revalidatePath('/post/123456') is run it will revalidate only post with id of 123456.

[icyJoseph]

Is it possible for your application to use revalidateTag? I think the purpose of revalidateTag is to give a bit more of granular control over which piece of data is revalidated, precisely for a use case as you describe. Your tag would be something like post/123, and you pass it to fetch.

fetch(url, { next: { tags: [...] } });

[icyJoseph]

Yeah I know that, but I had expected the revalidateTags to cover for the use case.

Though the pages revalidate was called on the API route response object. So it is most likely an entirely different implementation.

For completeness sake, since you've got a setup already. What happens if you create an API route under pages, and do the res.revalidate (of an app route page) as it was done in that stack?

[nrsimha]

Good idea, but res.revalidate unfortunately didn't revalidate app route pages.

[nrsimha]

I hope there will be some solution as if you have project where million of pages uses [...path] or [...slug] it is really bad to not be able to revalidate just one of them.

[icyJoseph]

Oh darn... Well, it might be time to open an issue. Perhaps the revalidate path function should take a second argument or something to make it be exact or loose, idk

[keenonsomething]

Yes please, I require this as well. No point to revalidate all when just one segment changes.

[salex97]

According to the documentation the problem is now solved.

The revalidatePath function now lets us revalidate the literal route segment from a dynamic path without revalidating all other dynamic segments aswell.

https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/functions/revalidatePath

[lucasbajoua]

The phrasing there is confusing, it sounds like all included routes in the dynamic segment still will be invalidated but only on the next request for them.