Admin UI Shows Phantom "Unsaved Changes" on Documents with Lexical Rich Text Fields Containing Blocks

[ryanovas]

Summary

The PayloadCMS admin interface consistently shows "unsaved changes" indicators immediately upon opening any document that contains Lexical rich text fields with blocks, even when no actual modifications have been made. This occurs every time the document is opened, making it impossible to distinguish real unsaved changes and these phantom changes.

Environment

PayloadCMS Version: 3.58.0 (latest)
Next.js Version: 15.3.0
React Version: 19.0.0
Database: PostgreSQL (via @payloadcms/db-postgres v3.58.0)
Editor: Lexical Rich Text Editor (@payloadcms/richtext-lexical v3.58.0)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a collection with Lexical rich text fields
2. Create a document with rich text content
3. Save the document
4. Navigate away and return to edit the same document
5. Result: Admin UI immediately shows unsaved changes indicator without making any modifications

Debug Attempts So Far

Through debugging with beforeChange hooks, we observed what appears to be JSON property reordering in Lexical editor fields during form processing:

What We Observed:

1. Database Storage: Lexical JSON appears to be stored with properties in one order (e.g., {"tag": "h2", "type": "heading", "format": "start"})
2. Form Loading: When the form loads, the Lexical JSON seems to be re-serialized with different property order (e.g., {"type": "heading", "format": "start", "tag": "h2"})
3. Change Detection: The admin UI detects this as a change, possibly because JSON.stringify() produces different results

Fields That Seem Affected:

• ✅ Lexical Rich Text fields
• ❌ Regular blocks fields - NOT affected (work normally)
• ❌ Simple fields (text, number, etc.) - NOT affected

Important Note:

This issue only occurs with Lexical rich text fields and only when there are blocks used. Regular blocks fields work fine. The issue appears to be specific to how the Lexical editor handles JSON serialization.

Has anyone else experienced this and figured out a solution or workaround?