Do not subscribe if channel empty string

[cmcaboy]

I was thinking of some way to conditionally subscribe, but the hook does not allow for that. As a work-around, I would like for the useChannel hook to subscribe only when the channel name is a truthy value.

[thisisjofrank]

Would it be better to use an if condition around the call to useChannel? Otherwise we'd have to return something valid from the useChannel call that wouldn't make semantic sense.

[michelts]

Would it be better to use an if condition around the call to useChannel

I don't think this is possible, you would break the rules of hooks.

My specific use-case is to lock usePresence for users behind a paywall. I wouldn't want to even spend connections with invalid users.

For now, I'm planning to write a component that conditionally render other components. Those would call useChannel/usePresence or stub them:

const App = () => (
  <MyChannelProvider>
     <Component />
  </MyChannelProvider>
)

const MyChannelProvider = () => {
  if(isValidUser) {
    return <ActualChannelProvider />
  } else {
    return <StubbedChannelProvider />
  }
}

const Component = () => {
  const channelData = useMyChannelProviderContext();
}

But it is a lot of boilerplate code. Having a way to skip the hook would be nice (similar to how we can conditionally fetch data with SWR, or skip Apollo requests).