react-hook-form VS zod

React Hook Form is one of the most popular libraries for building forms in React apps with over 39k stars on GitHub. The library has no external dependencies according to Bundle Phobia.

Link: https://react-hook-form.com/

The idea here is to first define an array of field names for each provider. We'll also need a map with more detailed information about each field. This map will contain the field name, label, type, and validation options. We'll use this map to render the form fields and also to validate the form. Finally, we'll have a Form component that will render the form fields based on their type and handle the form submission. We'll use React Hook Form to handle the form state and validation.

Now we need to install React Hook Form because that is the package we are going to use for building our form. We also need to install the package for SendGrid. cd into the sendgrid-contact-form folder and then run this command to install the packages:

Imagine someone unknowingly unleashing heavy computation on a component without useMemo. That computation will run on every component re-render. Not only that, The dependency array in your hooks (useEffect, useMemo, useCallback) are also checked in each re-render. It's like a double whammy for performance pitfalls! I know that you can avoid this by some technique like what react-hook-form done, but remember thats an extra complexity.

But now, all those difficulties are gone since I found React Hook Form and zod.

This will greatly simplify the handling of AJAX forms in React - like for instance for a search form. But again, this may not be enough to get rid of third-party libraries like React Hook Form, which does much more than just handle form submission (validation, side effects, etc).

We could consider to do all these steps specifically for each data-set; of course this isn't an efficient approach due to the amount of repeated code involved. So what if we could abstract all this in a single management? A way to do this could be using a simple configuration in which we specify each aspect for each input (its type, validations required and so on). And we can do this thanks to the extreme flexibility provided by React Hook Form.

React Hook Form Documentation

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. It helps create schemas for any data type and is very developer-friendly. Zod has the functional approach of "parse, don't validate." It supports coercion in all primitive types.

Link: https://zod.dev/

You can check out their documentation here.

You can learn more about Zod on their website here.

In JS, it's a good idea anyway to use some JSON parsing library instead of JSON.parse.

With Zod, you can use z.bigint() parser. If you take the "parse any JSON" snippet https://zod.dev/?id=json-type and change z.number() to z.bigint(), it should do what you are looking for.

We will validate our input using client-side zod. Zod handles TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference. This means that it will not only validate your fields, it will also set types on validated fields.

A word of warning: while discriminated unions are very powerful, there's an ongoing discussion on whether discriminated unions should be deprecated and replaced with a different API.

I was first introduced to Zod by Adam Bobrow - a colleague of mine and a dear friend. Adam was sick and tired from JavaScript's brittleness, and about two years ago he started migrating our code base to TypeScript. But that wasn't enough for him. He kept complaining: "What good are my types, if some other service decides to send me bad data and breaks my code?". That's when he discovered Zod.

It is (or should be) common practice to parse/validate any external data you depend on. You should be doing this for Javascript too. I find that the library https://zod.dev/ is quite helpful for this

Astro uses Zod, a Typescript-first schema validation library, to type-check the collections' schemas. It helps validate data types when using collections inside UI components.