I’m using the contentful React hook useContentful to retrieve an object that may or may not exist. The response includes flags loading and fetched, an error field, and a data field which typically contains an object with an items field, an array of the one object I wanted.
I expect that the immediate response will have loading true, fetched false, and no useful data. Then on a later render, after the network responds, loading will be false, fetched true, and there will be data: items should contain my object, or else error will tell me what went wrong.
What I observe is that, when I ask for a nonexistent object, I never get an error; instead, there are about four renders after loading is false and fetched true, all with data.items empty. When I ask for an object that does exist, I eventually get a response with loading false, fetched true, and a data.items containing my object.
The problem is that, when fetching a valid object, I sometimes get an additional response before the one I want, with loading false, fetched true, and data.items an empty collection–as far as I can tell, just like the response for a missing object.
This feels to me like a bug: if the object I want is no longer loading and has been fetched, it should be there in the data. But if not, surely there should be some way to tell the difference between this situation and a ‘not found’ response?
If so, can someone tell me how to distinguish them?
