What is the reason isStale time is not updating when enabled starts as false?

[spaansba]

What I'm Building

I'm creating a component that fetches images using ForesightJS for predictive prefetching. The component displays all query states in the button for testing purposes.

The Issue

All TanStack Query properties update correctly (isFetching, isRefetching, etc.) except isStale, which never changes from false even after the staleTime period has elapsed.

Code playground

codesandbox

[TkDodo]

the sandbox won’t run for me, showing 502 Bad Gateway. but you can clearly see here that isStale updates just fine: https://stackblitz.com/edit/tanstack-query-cxmgwdue?file=src%2Findex.tsx&preset=node

[TkDodo]

In the stackblitz, the query is disabled. If you remove enabled: false, you can see the query going to stale in the query devtools.

[spaansba]

Does that make sense? A query can still be stale even if its disabled right? Since you can fetch it with other means like the mentioned queryClient.prefetchQuery or queryClient.fetchQuery

[spaansba]

I searched through the code and it is a design decision to not calculate staleness for disabled queries.

in queryOberver.ts

function isStale(
  query: Query<any, any, any, any>,
  options: QueryObserverOptions<any, any, any, any, any>,
): boolean {
  return (
    resolveEnabled(options.enabled, query) !== false &&
    query.isStaleByTime(resolveStaleTime(options.staleTime, query))
  )
}

and even a test in queryObserver.test.ts

test('disabled observers should not be stale', () => {
  const key = queryKey()

  const observer = new QueryObserver(queryClient, {
    queryKey: key,
    enabled: false,
  })

  const result = observer.getCurrentResult()
  expect(result.isStale).toBe(false)
})

I am wondering why this was done though. I could think of some usecases where it would be nice to know the staleTime of a disabled query.

[TkDodo]

it’s from this PR:

• Feature/7055 stale disabled queries #7059

which closes this issue:

• Devtools incorrectly assume the staleTime from a disabled query #7055

if a query is marked as stale, it means it will refetch when there is a trigger happening. but disabled queries don’t do that, so isStale should be false.

[spaansba]

Thanks for the explanation. I still believe that a query should be able to become stale, since even a disabled query can contain stale data in theory, but I understand where you're coming from.