I have been working on some changes to Roll Your Tweet which includes moving from Fauna to PlanetScale and Prisma. This isn't a "this is better than that" situation it's actually a decision that I had be toying with for a while as I wanted to add some changes to the DB to make it easier to track from my side.
The issue
One of the improvements I am making is robust timestamps of sign ups, when working with Prisma it returns a beautiful timestamp which Next doesn't like and you get this error message:
Error: Error serializing `.user.subscription_end_date` returned from `getServerSideProps` in "/". Reason: `object` ("[object Date]") cannot be serialized as JSON. Please only return JSON serializable data types
The reason behind this is performant based, Next has made the decision to not handle date objects and the developer should. This in my opinion is a valid choice and allows the performance to be on the developer not on them. This happens when you use getStaticProps or getServerSideProps.
My Solution
At first I was ready to just manually parse the date to a string and then pass it along to next to return the data to the application. Then I realized I would have to do this every single time I wanted to parse the date, and as a developer "lazy" options are the best options.
I decided to install superjson and babel-plugin-superjson-next which takes care of all of it. superjson provides a thin wrapper over JSON.stringify and JSON.parse, which takes away the issues of date objects and other such problems.
yarn add babel-plugin-superjson-next superjson
Then create a .babelrc file with the following in it :
{
"presets": ["next/babel"],
"plugins": ["superjson-next"]
}
Now when you launch Next the error is gone and you can use a pure date object and handle the serializing as needed.