react-window VS nanoid

As we have seen in the previous section we can implement virtual scrolling from scratch. In this section, we'll discuss a third-party tool called react-window that allows us to implement virtual scrolling in a much easier way.

If you have been using React for awhile, you may have heard of the infamous virtualisation library react-window or it's predecessor react-virtualized

React Window is used to render long lists. Imagine you have a list of 1,000 items. Only ten are visible simultaneously, but your code tries to render all 1,000 items simultaneously.

You can try react-window by Brian Vaughn

I'm trying to use react-window and react-nice-scroll together but unfortunately it didn't work at all. As soon as I wrap my component with from react-nice-scroll everything disappears.

This is what you should look into. (Virtualization)

Take a look at react-window. But just my perspective; if you haven't needed to look into what virtualization is, it's probably because you haven't had a need for it yet. The one implication (which you'll see in another comment form me in this thread) is that it removes CTRL+F search functionality for items outside of the "window".

Virtualization can be achieved using third-party libraries like react-window or react-virtualized. These libraries provide a way to render only the visible data and load more data as needed, resulting in faster application performance.

If the API data is not paginated (i.e. you’re getting all your data in one go), then you may not need pagination. If rendering performance is an issue, a virtualized list may be more appropriate. If the response is too big and is slow to fetch it’s another issue entirely, since if the API doesn’t support offsets / pages you would need to invent a criteria to paginate your data on, or fetch it on the server using React Server Components which gives you implement a cache layer and potentially allows to only send a chunk of that data to the client, but you see how that can get complex fast.

Oh, right. I totally forgot to mention that– but the idea of "less rendering" in this case seems less like a Suspense concern and more like a windowing concern. I've written a few libraries for that stuff (react-window and react-virtualized) although there are others that may fit your needs better. Their main focus is limiting what you're rendering to more or less only what's on the screen at any given point. Combine that with memoized filtering and I would imagine you're set.

Last thing left is to use our new upload function in our server action. Since I like to upload images in single format and have some more control over them, I will additionally use sharp library. For file name, I'll generate some random string using nanoid:

Our API is in node. And God, how I suffered to import nanoid in an esmodule project. I had to vendor it, since using a previous version was not ideal. With bun, we can no longer worry about that. Just import what you need and done.

No thread about UUID is complete without a plug for NanoID! https://github.com/ai/nanoid/blob/main/README.md

Generate a unique file name using the nanoid library.

The syntax should read similar to SQL itself. We’re using a Python port of nanoid to generate our IDs. There’s only one thing missing… how do we actually create the table?

I usually go for Nano Id for new projects https://github.com/ai/nanoid

Nano ID

In another comment I mentioned I use nanoid in my projects now. It has a default space of 64^21 and has an a page where you can play with key lengths and alphabet sizes and see the probability of collisions :

https://zelark.github.io/nano-id-cc/

At the default 64 character alphabet with a 21 character key length it would take ~41 million years in order to have a 1% probability of at least one collision if you generated 1000 ids per second.

Using randomly generated IDs like Nano ID could be a good alternative, however, as a developer, we must understand what Nano ID really does in our application. Defining the number of characters in the generated IDs is also important, to help with that Nano ID has a Collision Calculator to give us how many years in order to have a 1% probability of collision.