Is it expected behavior for the

useSessionContext

hook from the

auth-react/recipe

to not change/cause a rerender when the accessToken expires?

hey @garrett7056

howdy!

yes. When the access token expires, this simply means that the next request will refresh the session - it doesn't mean that the session doesn't exist anymore

hmmm, maybe we're doing something wrong - I'll try to explain...

oh i see. So you read the jwt from useSessionContext

I could look into using that function instead

yea. If you use that, then it will not cause this issue

gotcha - still interested to hear Porcellus' thoughts since was already tagged. We're using react hooks to achieve all this behavior so it'd be very nice if there was some way to make something like this work, really helps composability of hooks etc...

Hi, I have to agree - the

useSessionContext

isn't supposed to be doing updates like that. If you have to have a fresh value (like in your case) you should use

getAccessTokenPayloadSecurely

directly before the call.

there may be something else there, it is the same backend, we just use

hasura

so I don't think we're protecting the underlying express routes in the way you would expect. I do think that's probably why we're not getting some of the baked in features you're referring to though.

the interception is applied by the

apiDomain

passed to the init function in

appInfo

. If a request to

apiDomain

is rejected with a 401 it should trigger a refresh.

If it triggers a refresh, the old JWT will still be reused when the frontend SDK retries the original request which would cause a 401 again, and a refresh again and so on... So first, why is it not triggering a refresh? Secondly, we don't even want it to trigger a refresh cause it would cause an infinite loop...

so, just circling back on this - we used these docs as our guide: https://supertokens.com/docs/thirdpartyemailpassword/common-customizations/sessions/with-jwt/read-jwt#fetching-the-jwt-on-the-frontend - but you're saying that we can't always rely on that to be the most up to date access token and it would take us making a request that returns a 401 that only then it should try to refresh? Maybe another way to frame the question, since the expiration of the jwt is known on the front-end, why does it take intercepting some other request attempt to trigger a refresh?

Right. So the docs shouldn’t have the using react context method for this. I’ll update it. Use the without context method. That’s the correct way

can you link the example without context method?

it's on the same page, same section - there is a tab for it

So here's the problem I think I'm having with this approach. I want to use it in a react hook. It's a common pattern to use react hooks that get a value from a global context. That way if the underlying value that the context is returning changes (a part of the session for example, in this case, the accessToken jwt), it can cascade through the hook and to whatever part of the app that cares about it. In this particular instance, a fetcher, but it could just as easily be a different value from the accessToken and another part of the app like a simple React component. So if I use the "without context" approach you have here, I have to write the business logic when it needs to refresh, right? Isn't that something that fits more in the SDK?

You don’t need to write business logic for refreshing here cause if the access token expires, it doesn’t indicate a state change from a UX point of view - that is to say, a session still exists. So there is no need to cause rerenders. This is as opposed to the session expiring which would cause rerenders when that is detected.