Setup

I have the following react-query hook:

const STALE_TIME_MS = 12 * 60 * 60 * 1000; // 12h

const useUser = () => {
  const services = useServices();
  const { isLoading, error, data } = useQuery(
    'user',
    () => services.user.verify(),
    {
      staleTime: STALE_TIME_MS,
      cacheTime: STALE_TIME_MS,
    }
  );
  return {
    isLoading,
    error,
    user: data,
  };
};

Then, I have an App component as a child lives inside the QueryClientProvider:

const App = () => {
  const { isLoading } = useUser();

  if (isLoading) {
    return <Authenticating />;
  }

  return (
    <HashRouter>
      <Switch>
        <Route path="/login" component={Login} />
        <Route path="/" component={Dashboard} />
      </Switch>
    </HashRouter>
  );
}

The Login component checks if the user is already logged in and redirects it back to /:

const Login = () => {
  const { user } = useUser();

  if (user) {
    return <Redirect to="/" />;
  }

  ...
}

The Dashboard component does the reverse:

const Dashboard = () => {
  const { user } = useUser();

  if (!user) {
    return <Redirect to="/login" />;
  }

  ...
};

Problem

When the request that services.user.verify() makes fails, react-query keeps retrying the user query indefinitely. This is despite the fact that react-query's default retries is 3.

The problem seems to come from the fact that I am calling useUser() from multiple components that are mounting/unmounting. When I remove the redirect logic from Dashboard and Login, react-query retries 3 times and then takes me to the login screen as expected.

The interesting fact is that the user query is marked as stale. If I change my services.user.verify() implementation to return null instead of throwing an error when the user is not authenticated, the query is marked as fresh and I don't have this problem at all.

Questions

• Does react-query always consider queries stale when they fail even after the retries?
• Does a new component calling the query always result in a retry?
• Is there an option to prevent this from happening?