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.

[Zod Documentation](https://zod.dev/) [Zod Error Handling](https://zod.dev/ERROR_HANDLING?id=error-handling-in-zod) [React-Hook-Form Documentation](https://react-hook-form.com/get-started) [Hookform Resolvers](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hookform/resolvers)

This is a very fair comment, and you seem open to understanding why types are useful.

"problems that are due to typing" is a very difficult thing to unpack because types can mean _so_ many things.

Static types are absolutely useless (and, really, a net negative) if you're not using them well.

Types don't help if you don't spend the time modeling with the type system. You can use the type system to your advantage to prevent invalid states from being represented _at all_.

As an example, consider a music player that keeps track of the current song and the current position in the song.

If you model this naively you might do something like: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/d0f57c99bfd69cf9eada4...

In the example above you _are_ using types. It might not be obvious that some of these issues can be solved with stronger types, that is, you might say that "You rarely see problems that are due to typing".

Here's an example where the type system can give you a lot more safety: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/0976bc9d86f0a19a75757...

You'll notice that this kind of safety is pretty limited. If you're going to write a music app, you'll probably need API calls, local storage, URL routes, etc.

TypeScript's typechecking ends at the "boundaries" of the type system, e.g. it cannot automatically typecheck your fetch or localStorage calls return the correct types. If you're casting, you're bypassing the type systems and making it worthless. Runtime type checking libraries like Zod [0] can take care of this for you and are able to typecheck at the boundaries of your app so that the type system can work _extremely_ well.

[0]: https://zod.dev/ note: I mentioned Zod because I like it. There are _many_ similar libraries.

Zod is an open-source schema declaration and validation library that emphasizes TypeScript. It can refer to any data type, from simple to complex. Zod eliminates duplicative type declarations by inferring static TypeScript types and allows easy composition of complex data structures from simpler ones. It has no dependencies, is compatible with Node.js and modern browsers, and has a concise, chainable interface. Zod is lightweight (8kb when zipped), immutable, with methods returning new instances. It encourages parsing over validation and is not limited to TypeScript but works well with JavaScript as well.

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.