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Best Practices

Network Changes

Handling a change in the network (e.g. Görli vs Mainnet) is incredibly complex and a slight failure can at best make your application seem confusing and at worst cause the loss of funds, leak private data or misrepresent what an action performed.

Luckily, standard users should likely never change their networks unless tricked to do so or they make a mistake.

This is a problem you mainly need to worry about for developers, and most developers should understand the vast array of issues surrounding a network change during application operation and will understand the page reloading (which is already the default behaviour in many clients).

So, the best practice when a network change occurs is to simply refresh the page. This should cause all your UI components to reset to a known-safe state, including any banners and warnings to your users if they are on an unsupported network.

This can be accomplished by using the following function:

Automatically Refresh on Network Change

// Force page refreshes on network changes { // The "any" network will allow spontaneous network changes const provider = new ethers.providers.Web3Provider(window.ethereum, "any"); provider.on("network", (newNetwork, oldNetwork) => { // When a Provider makes its initial connection, it emits a "network" // event with a null oldNetwork along with the newNetwork. So, if the // oldNetwork exists, it represents a changing network if (oldNetwork) { window.location.reload(); } }); }

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