StaticRouter: retain location.state [WiP]

[wmertens]

When redirecting, location.state is lost. This can be useful to pass information like state: {permanent: true} which could result in HTTP 301 response.

Spiritual continuation of #5930; no tests yet, just a proposal.

[timdorr]

This seems sensible, but we need tests.

[pshrmn]

I believe #5722 would supersede this (it removes normalizeLocation and uses history.createLocation instead).

[timdorr]

Yes, it would. But it also doesn't have tests for location.state 😄

[mjackson]

Can you please show some a small sample app where you found this useful, @wmertens? It would help me to get inside your head and see why you think this is useful.

[wmertens]

@mjackson there are 2 main cases:

• differentiate between 301 and 302 redirects:
  • For SEO, I have been told that it's better that pages be redirected 301 to their canonical equivalent. This also makes browsers remember and directly ask for the canonical URL.
  • However, for e.g. redirecting after logout, 302 should be used, otherwise you can't visit the originating URL any more :)
• mark a page as missing (404):
  • Search engines have to know when a page has no real content. For example if you link to a wrong url on a blog, Google needs to know that that is a 404, but regular visitors should not have their url changed to /404.
  • Right now I'm working around this by not redirecting when the url is /404, but it's cleaner to just pass notFound in the state.

Anyway, I do believe that the new version with #5722 should fix this, but I didn't get around to trying it yet.

[wmertens]

Closing this PR (at least until I got to test the new version), but would be interested in other approaches to those use cases @mjackson!