If you have multiple blocks that are used in multiple places, this can quickly blow up the size of your Payload Config. This will incur a performance hit, as more data is
1. sent to the client (=> bloated `ClientConfig` and large initial html) and
2. processed on the server (permissions are calculated every single time you navigate to a page - this iterates through all blocks you have defined, even if they're duplicative)
This can be optimized by defining your block **once** in your Payload Config, and just referencing the block slug whenever it's used, instead of passing the entire block config. To do this, the block can be defined in the `blocks` array of the Payload Config. The slug can then be passed to the `blockReferences` array in the Blocks Field - the `blocks` array has to be empty for compatibility reasons.
```ts
import { buildConfig } from 'payload'
import { lexicalEditor, BlocksFeature } from '@payloadcms/richtext-lexical'
// Payload Config
const config = buildConfig({
// Define the block once
blocks: [
{
slug: 'TextBlock',
fields: [
{
name: 'text',
type: 'text',
},
],
},
],
collections: [
{
slug: 'collection1',
fields: [
{
name: 'content',
type: 'blocks',
// Reference the block by slug
blockReferences: ['TextBlock'],
blocks: [], // Required to be empty, for compatibility reasons
},
],
},
{
slug: 'collection2',
fields: [
{
name: 'editor',
type: 'richText',
editor: lexicalEditor({
BlocksFeature({
// Same reference can be reused anywhere, even in the lexical editor, without incurred performance hit
blocks: ['TextBlock'],
})
})
},
],
},
],
})
```
## v4.0 Plans
In 4.0, we will remove the `blockReferences` property, and allow string block references to be passed directly to the blocks `property`. Essentially, we'd remove the `blocks` property and rename `blockReferences` to `blocks`.
The reason we opted to a new property in this PR is to avoid breaking changes. Allowing strings to be passed to the `blocks` property will prevent plugins that iterate through fields / blocks from compiling.
## PR Changes
- Testing: This PR introduces a plugin that automatically converts blocks to block references. This is done in the fields__blocks test suite, to run our existing test suite using block references.
- Block References support: Most changes are similar. Everywhere we iterate through blocks, we have to now do the following:
1. Check if `field.blockReferences` is provided. If so, only iterate through that.
2. Check if the block is an object (= actual block), or string
3. If it's a string, pull the actual block from the Payload Config or from `payload.blocks`.
The exception is config sanitization and block type generations. This PR optimizes them so that each block is only handled once, instead of every time the block is referenced.
## Benchmarks
60 Block fields, each block field having the same 600 Blocks.
### Before:
**Initial HTML:** 195 kB
**Generated types:** takes 11 minutes, 461,209 lines
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/11d49a4e-5414-4579-8050-e6346e552f56
### After:
**Initial HTML:** 73.6 kB
**Generated types:** takes 2 seconds, 35,810 lines
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3eab1a99-6c29-489d-add5-698df67780a3
### After Permissions Optimization (follow-up PR)
Initial HTML: 73.6 kB
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a909202e-45a8-4bf6-9a38-8c85813f1312
## Future Plans
1. This PR does not yet deduplicate block references during permissions calculation. We'll optimize that in a separate PR, as this one is already large enough
2. The same optimization can be done to deduplicate fields. One common use-case would be link field groups that may be referenced in multiple entities, outside of blocks. We might explore adding a new `fieldReferences` property, that allows you to reference those same `config.blocks`.
Should fix messed up import suggestions and simplifies all tsconfigs
through inheritance.
One main issue was that packages were inheriting `baseURL: "."` from the
root tsconfig. This caused incorrect import suggestions that start with
"packages/...".
This PR ensures that packages do not inherit this baseURL: "." property,
while ensuring the root, non-inherited tsconfig still keeps it to get
tests to work (the importMap needs it)
This noticeably improves performance in the admin panel, for example
when there are multiple richtext editors on one page (& likely
performance in other areas too, though I mainly tested rich text).
The babel plugin currently only optimizes files with a 'use client'
directive at the top - thus we have to make sure to add use client
wherever possible, even if it's imported by a parent client component.
There's one single component that broke when it was compiled using the
React compiler (it stopped being reactive and failed one of our admin
e2e tests):
150808f608
opting out of it completely fixed that issue
Fixes https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/issues/7366
