Include terms like "server" or "SSR" in "When not to create a collection" section

[silveltman]

Came up in this discord message: https://discord.com/channels/830184174198718474/830184175176122389/1351863234356842538

I was looking for terms like "server", "SSR" to see if the content collection update only on a build, or also on a server/SSR refresh.

I see now that the term "on-demand" is used. I was personally not aware yet of this term, and believe it used to be called server-side rendering.

Also, it might be useful to include something about content collection not re-rendering on a SSR refresh in this section: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/#building-for-server-output-ssr. Because this is where I landed when searching the term SSR.

Are SSR and on-demand different things, or different words for the same thing?

[delucis]

Are SSR and on-demand different things, or different words for the same thing?

More or less the same thing. We chose “on-demand rendering” for docs to better indicate when the render happens, because technically also static pages are “server-side rendered” it just happens once during the build process vs on-demand when a server request arrives.

[sarah11918]

Hi! As Chris said, "SSR (server-side rendering)" is commonly used to mean "server-side rendering on demand"... but it's the "on demand" that is the meaningful part here, and what distinguishes it from prerendering static pages at build time (which is also rendered server-side!). So, that is the term we use.

As for stating that content collections are not rebuilt on demand, we do say that in https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/#when-not-to-create-a-collection :

• You are using APIs that need to be updated in real time. Content collections are only updated at build time, so if you need live data, use other methods of importing files or fetching data with on-demand rendering.

This isn't an on demand vs prerendered issue. Collections are always only updated at build time at the moment. We have an experimental proposal for "live updating" collections: live content loaders So, we would like to try to remove this restriction eventually with the option to have collections load as needed.

Given that, I think it's probably fine to keep the documentation as is. We will need to update the content of the page when this is no longer accurate.