I am currently looking into alternative forms of user authorization and authentication. Among the solutions I am looking into is Clerk. It’s pretty sweet and has a lot of cool features baked in. (Although the MFA support is a premium add-on and they aren’t super upfront about that).
One of the issues I ran into while implementing Clerk was a redirect loop. I set my home page within the Clerk Dashboard and when I reloaded my app, boom REDIRECTION FOR DAYS. Clerk was continuing to reload the home page for all eternity.
So, I added an onbeforeunload event into the page with a debugger call inside of it. This paused the page in the inspector before it reloaded and allowed me to actually see what was going on.
It turns out that Clerk was outputting an error message into the console. This error message is pictured below:
The <SignUp/> and <SignIn/> components cannot render when a user is already signed in, unless the application allows multiple sessions. Since a user is signed in and this application only allows a single session, Clerk is redirecting to the Home URL instead. (This notice only appears in development)
🔒 Clerk
Well – ok then. Clerk is redirecting to the Home URL (which is the one it’s already on) and causing a permanent redirect loop. It seems like this would be handled better by simply _not_ loading the SignIn or SignUp components should the conditions for their existence fail.
Hopefully this helps you out! You might consider making your home page and your sign in pages different pages, or conditionally load those components, so that Clerk can be happy and not mess things up.
Ok, let’s cut to the chase. Everyone knows that converting a JavaScript Map to JSON does not work out of the box. By default, the JSON.stringify method will return a {} when converting a Map. It’s super helpful, because it returns an empty object, which is usually precisely what we don’t want. That’s a wee bit frustrating!
How Not to Serialize a Map to JSON
The internet has provided us with the silver bullet, though, right? Object.entries is great and can do all things, right? WRONG. That is wrong and you are wrong if you think that it’s right. You see what I’m getting at?
The existing advice is to use Object.fromEntries and Object.entries in tandem to make it easy to convert a map to and from JSON. The code below shows you this method in all it’s glory.
// ### inspired code below
const mapToSerialize = new Map([[1, 'first key']])
const serializedMap = JSON.stringify(Object.fromEntries(mapToSerialize ))
// now deserialize
const deserializedMap = new Map(Object.entries(JSON.parse(serializedMap)))
Isn’t the code above beautiful? Doesn’t it just wonderfully handle our serialization in the best of ways? No! It doesn’t. Let’s compare the original map to the deserialized map and see how amazing the code works.
The original map looks like this when logged to the console Map(1) {1 => 'first key'}. The deserialized map looks like this when logged to the console: Map(1) {'1' => 'first key'}. Did you spot the difference?
Just to make things clear, let’s try to delete the keyed value out of our Map.
Hey look, deleting that value totally didn’t work
So really, in the end, our serialization using the currently advised method totally works. We serialize our map, deserialize it, and then can’t use it properly. Just as we expected.
NO. It doesn’t work correctly. The difference is that the original map uses an integer key, and the deserialized map uses a string key. When we attempt to delete the value out of the deserialized map, using the key, it fails because the type doesn’t match.
How to Serialize a Map to JSON
I am proposing a different way to serialize a map to JSON.
Create a new array from the existing map
Serialize the array to JSON
Create a new map from the deserialized JSON
The code I propose looks like this. You might not want to keep the logging at the end in your own implementations.
/// ### ugly code below
const mapToSerialize = new Map([[1, 'first key']])
// convert the map to JSON
const arrayToSerialize = []
mapToSerialize.forEach((value, key) => arrayToSerialize.push([key, value]))
const serializedMap = JSON.stringify(arrayToSerialize)
// convert the JSON back to a map
const deserializedMap = new Map(JSON.parse(serializedMap))
// log to console for inspection
console.log(mapToSerialize)
console.log(deserializedMap)
This code correctly works to serialize and deserialize a map to/from JSON.
Look at that, both maps match
In Conclusion
Serializing a Map to and from JSON isn’t as simple as it looks on the outside. Especially if from the outside it looks like it would be super simple. The Object.entries silver bullet only works for Maps with string keys, and attempting to use it for Maps with integer keys will end up with you hating your life. You probably will start listening to Barry Manilow constantly. You might even start eating Quinoa. I’m sure it happens all of the time due to Map serialization woes.
Anyways, if you prefer to not eat Quinoa, then go ahead and convert your Maps to and from JSON the way I suggested above.
What I expected was that the value of the i variable at the time it was called would be used in my callback method. However, this was not the case… the i variable was the same in every single callback.
So, in our situation we’ve defined var i. This is processed before the loop is processed and it is as if we wrote this:
var i;
for(i=0;i<10;i++){
$myElement.on('some-event', function(){
DoSomethingWith(i);
});
}
Now it becomes a bit more clear why we are running into the issue with i being the same. The reason is because by the time the callback is executed the for loop has already run and the value of the i variable is already 10.
The solution, as far as I can tell, is to use an IIFE to scope the variable correctly in order store the current value for later. It looks ugly and it feels hacky… but it seems to be what is necessary. Update: It appears that you can also use .bind to set the value correctly as well.
