The canvas react components pass canvas entity identifiers around, then redux selectors are used to access that entity. This is good for perf - entity states may rapidly change. Passing only the identifiers allows components and other logic to have more granular state updates.
Unfortunately, this design opens the possibility for for an entity identifier to point to an entity that does not exist.
To get around this, I had created a redux selector `selectEntityOrThrow` for canvas entities. As the name implies, it throws if the entity is not found.
While it prevents components/hooks from needing to deal with missing entities, it results in mysterious errors if an entity is missing. Without sourcemaps, it's very difficult to determine what component or hook couldn't find the entity.
Refactoring the app to not depend on this behaviour is tricky. We could pass the entity state around directly as a prop or via context, but as mentioned, this could cause performance issues with rapidly changing entities.
As a workaround, I've made two changes:
- `<CanvasEntityStateGate/>` is a component that takes an entity identifier, returning its children if the entity state exists, or null if not. This component is wraps every usage of `selectEntityOrThrow`. Theoretically, this should prevent the entity not found errors.
- Add a `caller: string` arg to `selectEntityOrThrow`. This string is now added to the error message when the assertion fails, so we can more easily track the source of the errors.
In the future we can work out a way to not use this throwing selector and retain perf. The app has changed quite a bit since that selector was created - so we may not have to worry about perf at all.
So far, this includes:
- Save Canvas to Gallery
- Save Bbox to Gallery
- Send Bbox to Regional IP Adapter
- Send Bbox to Global IP Adapter
- Send Bbox to Control Layer
- Send Bbox to Raster Layer
