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`.
Fixes https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/issues/9363
This fixes the following issues that caused fields to be either hidden,
or incorrectly set to readOnly in certain configurations:
- In some cases, permissions were sanitized incorrectly. This PR
rewrites the sanitizePermissions function and adds new unit tests
- after a document save, the client was receiving unsanitized
permissions. Moving the sanitization logic to the endpoint fixes this
- Various incorrect handling of permissions in our form state endpoints
/ RenderFields
# Breaking Changes
### New file import locations
Exports from the `payload` package have been _significantly_ cleaned up.
Now, just about everything is able to be imported from `payload`
directly, rather than an assortment of subpath exports. This means that
things like `import { buildConfig } from 'payload/config'` are now just
imported via `import { buildConfig } from 'payload'`. The mental model
is significantly simpler for developers, but you might need to update
some of your imports.
Payload now exposes only three exports:
1. `payload` - all types and server-only Payload code
2. `payload/shared` - utilities that can be used in either the browser
or in Node environments
3. `payload/node` - heavy utilities that should only be imported in Node
scripts and never be imported into bundled code like Next.js
### UI library pre-bundling
With this release, we've dramatically sped up the compile time for
Payload by pre-bundling our entire UI package for use inside of the
Payload admin itself. There are new exports that should be used within
Payload custom components:
1. `@payloadcms/ui/client` - all client components
2. `@payloadcms/ui/server` - all server components
For all of your custom Payload admin UI components, you should be
importing from one of these two pre-compiled barrel files rather than
importing from the more deeply nested exports directly. That will keep
compile times nice and speedy, and will also make sure that the bundled
JS for your admin UI is kept small.
For example, whereas before, if you imported the Payload `Button`, you
would have imported it like this:
```ts
import { Button } from '@payloadcms/ui/elements/Button'
```
Now, you would import it like this:
```ts
import { Button } from '@payloadcms/ui/client'
```
This is a significant DX / performance optimization that we're pretty
pumped about.
However, if you are importing or re-using Payload UI components
_outside_ of the Payload admin UI, for example in your own frontend
apps, you can import from the individual component exports which will
make sure that the bundled JS is kept to a minimum in your frontend
apps. So in your own frontend, you can continue to import directly to
the components that you want to consume rather than importing from the
pre-compiled barrel files.
Individual component exports will now come with their corresponding CSS
and everything will work perfectly as-expected.
### Specific exports have changed
- `'@payloadcms/ui/templates/Default'` and
`'@payloadcms/ui/templates/Minimal`' are now exported from
`'@payloadcms/next/templates'`
- Old: `import { LogOut } from '@payloadcms/ui/icons/LogOut'` new:
`import { LogOutIcon } from '@payloadcms/ui/icons/LogOut'`
## Background info
In effort to make local dev as fast as possible, we need to import as
few files as possible so that the compiler has less to process. One way
we've achieved this in the Admin Panel was to _remove_ all .scss imports
from all components in the `@payloadcms/ui` module using a build
process. This stripped all `import './index.scss'` statements out of
each component before injecting them into `dist`. Instead, it bundles
all of the CSS into a single `main.css` file, and we import _that_ at
the root of the app.
While this concept is _still_ the right solution to the problem, this
particular approach is not viable when using these components outside
the Admin Panel, where not only does this root stylesheet not exist, but
where it would also bloat your app with unused styles. Instead, we need
to _keep_ these .scss imports in place so they are imported directly
alongside your components, as expected. Then, we need create a _new_
build step that _separately_ compiles the components _without_ their
stylesheets—this way your app can consume either as needed from the new
`client` and `server` barrel files within `@payloadcms/ui`, i.e. from
within `@payloadcms/next` and all other admin-specific packages and
plugins.
This way, all other applications will simply import using the direct
file paths, just as they did before. Except now they come with
stylesheets.
And we've gotten a pretty awesome initial compilation performance boost.
---------
Co-authored-by: James <james@trbl.design>
Co-authored-by: Alessio Gravili <alessio@gravili.de>
## BREAKING
- Our internal field hook methods now have new required `schemaPath` and
path `props`. This affects the following functions, if you are using
those: `afterChangeTraverseFields`, `afterReadTraverseFields`,
`beforeChangeTraverseFields`, `beforeValidateTraverseFields`,
`afterReadPromise`
- The afterChange field hook's `value` is now the value AFTER the
previous hooks were run. Previously, this was the original value, which
I believe is a bug
- Only relevant if you have built your own richText adapter: the
richText adapter `populationPromises` property has been renamed to
`graphQLPopulationPromises` and is now only run for graphQL. Previously,
it was run for graphQL AND the rest API. To migrate, use
`hooks.afterRead` to run population for the rest API
- Only relevant if you have built your own lexical features: The
`populationPromises` server feature property has been renamed to
`graphQLPopulationPromises` and is now only run for graphQL. Previously,
it was run for graphQL AND the rest API. To migrate, use
`hooks.afterRead` to run population for the rest API
- Serialized lexical link and upload nodes now have a new `id` property.
While not breaking, localization / hooks will not work for their fields
until you have migrated to that. Re-saving the old document on the new
version will automatically add the `id` property for you. You will also
get a bunch of console logs for every lexical node which is not migrated
