Query Invalidation

Waiting for queries to become stale before they are fetched again doesn't always work, especially when you know for a fact that a query needs to get refetched. For that purpose, the queryCache has an invalidateQueries method that lets you manually mark queries as stale and potentially refetch them too!

 queryCache.invalidateQueries('todos')

Note: Where other libraries that use normalized caches would attempt to update local queries with the new data imperatively, React Query gives you the tools to avoid the manual labor that comes with maintaining normalized caches and instead prescribes invalidation, background-refetching and ultimately atomic updates.

When a query is invalidated with invalidateQueries, two things happen:

• It is marked as stale, regardless of its staleTime configuration
• If the query is active (rendered via useQuery and friends), it will also be refetched in the background

Query Matching with invalidateQueries

When using APIs like invalidateQueries and removeQueries (and others that support partial query matching), you can match multiple queries by their prefix, or get really specific and match an exact query.

In this example, we can use the todos prefix to invalidate any queries that start with todos in their query key:

1 import { useQuery, useQueryCache } from 'react-query'
2 
3 // Get QueryCache from the context
4 const queryCache = useQueryCache()
5 
6 queryCache.invalidateQueries('todos')
7 
8 // Both queries below will be invalidated
9 const todoListQuery = useQuery('todos', fetchTodoList)
10 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos', { page: 1 }], fetchTodoList)

You can even invalidate queries with specific variables by passing a more specific query key to the invalidateQueries method:

1 queryCache.invalidateQueries(['todos', { type: 'done' }])
2 
3 // The query below will be invalidated
4 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos', { type: 'done' }], fetchTodoList)
5 // However, the following query below will NOT be invalidated
6 const todoListQuery = useQuery('todos', fetchTodoList)

The invalidateQueries API is very flexible, so even if you want to only invalidate todos queries that don't have any more variables or subkeys, you can pass an exact: true option to the invalidateQueries method:

1 queryCache.invalidateQueries('todos', { exact: true })
2 
3 // The query below will be invalidated
4 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos'], fetchTodoList)
5 // However, the following query below will NOT be invalidated
6 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos', { type: 'done' }], fetchTodoList)

If you find yourself wanting even more granularity, you can pass a predicate function to the invalidateQueries method. This function will receive each query object from the queryCache and allow you to return true or false for whether you want to invalidate that query:

1 queryCache.invalidateQueries(
2   query => query.queryKey[0] === 'todos' && query.queryKey[1]?.version >= 10
3 )
4 
5 // The query below will be invalidated
6 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos', { version: 20 }], fetchTodoList)
7 // The query below will be invalidated
8 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos', { version: 10 }], fetchTodoList)
9 // However, the following query below will NOT be invalidated
10 const todoListQuery = useQuery(['todos', { version: 5 }], fetchTodoList)