Async validation
If you're using a validation library that supports async validation, you can take full advantage of that on both the client and the server.
Client side
On the client side, your validation schema is not the best place to make calls to an api. There are a couple reasons for this:
- The user shouldn't have to wait for unnecessary API calls before the actual form submit. You need to validate in your action anyway, so it's better to do those validations there.
- For some validation libraries (like
zod), it's not possible to run only the validations for one field. This means that all your async validations get run any time you change a single field.
Async validation on the client is primarily for those cases where something needs to be async,
but it still doesn't take longer than a few milliseconds for the most part.
In some cases you might want to hit your api to perform some checks,
but in those cases it's probably best to do so using useFetcher.
Server side
On the server, you can put absolutely anything you want in your validation schema.
In fact, this can be a good way to add extra checks like checking if a username is already taken.
This does mean keeping separate client & server validators based on the same schema,
but with libraries like yup and zod, it's possible to have one base schema and augment it
as needed.
Example
In this example, we have a basic sign-up form.
Often, it's a good idea in this sort of form to provide some information to the user about
whether or not their username is taken before they actually submit.
We're providing that information here by using the useFetcher hook.
Then, on the server side, we're using the refine method on the base zod schema,
to add an async database query to the validation schema.