Server and client pages in the same app

[andresgutgon]

What?

Hi everyone,

I came across this discussion and wanted to share some thoughts. As mentioned in the thread, it would be beneficial for the Inertia protocol to explicitly indicate when a page has been server-rendered. This would allow the client to handle hydration or treat the page appropriately as a client-side page.

Currently, we can achieve this by manually assigning a custom prop:

conn
|> assign_prop(:ssr, true)
|> render_inertia("MyPage", ssr: true)

However, since the render method already has knowledge of whether the page is server-rendered, it would be great if this information were included as part of the standard Inertia response.

For example:

{
  "component": "Event",
  "props": {
    "event": {
      "id": 80,
      "title": "Birthday party",
      "start_date": "2019-06-02",
      "description": "Come out and celebrate Jonathan's 36th birthday party!"
    }
  },
  "url": "/events/80",
  "version": "c32b8e4965f418ad16eaebba1d4e960f",
  "encryptHistory": true,
  "clearHistory": false,
  "ssr": true // Proposed addition
}

This small addition could improve client-side behavior without requiring a manual workaround. Would love to hear thoughts on whether this could be considered as an enhancement!

Thanks for all the great work on this project! 🚀