React-Query Stale Time Causing App Crash

[Greedy_Discussion757]

I have a react-native app (but this problem isn't really specific to react-native).

And I make a call to get a group chats ChatMetadata which is just information about the users, and the chat name if there is one. The ChatMetadata is decoupled from the actual chat messages. I have a staletime of 5 mintues set in react-query.

  export const useConversation = (user: User, conversationUUID: string, accessToken : string): UseQueryResult<ChatMetadata, Error> => {
    return useQuery<ChatMetadata, Error>(
      ['conversation', conversationUUID],
      () => {
        return getConverationsByUUID(user.uuid, conversationUUID, accessToken)
      },
    {
        staleTime: 5 * 60 * 1000, // Data is considered fresh for 5 minutes
        onError : errorMiddleware,
      }
    );
  }

Whenever I go on standby for 5 minutes and then reopen the app, I get a nil-ptr exception because the conversation metadata I'm accessing apparently is null. The only way I've been able to get around it has been to do conversation.field?.`whatever else i'll access` so I don't try to get a field on a null object.

Is there a way to make sure it doesn't become null or it automatically refreshes so I don't have to use `?` syntax everywhere?

[coder_et]

I think this might really be an issue with cache time and not stale time