Reading Redux Docs

Reading Redux Docs

How State Flows in Redux


React Redux Flow

Guiding Principles

  • Single Source of Truth
  • State is read-only
  • Changes are made with pure functions

Actions

  • Actions are payloads of information that send data from your application to your store. They are the only source of information for the store.
  • Actions must have a type property defined as string constants
  • Other than type, the structure is up to you
  • Pass as little data as possible. For example, if you're accessing an item in an array, it's advised to pass the index instead of the whole object.
  • Action Creators are functions that return an action. They are used in conjuction with dispatch
  • Describes what happened
  • POJO
  • For asynchronous calls, you can have 2 approaches when dispatching actions: (1) Same action type but with different payload (2) Different action types and different payloads. Prefer the second form specially if you need UI updates in between.

Reducers

  • A function that returns a piece of the application state
export default function(){
  return { key: 'value'}
}
  • In charge of manipulating the data
  • A Reducer is a pure function that takes the previous state and an action, and returns the next state
  • It's called a reducer because it's the type of function you would pass to Array.prototype.reduce
  • Things you should never do inside a reducer: (1) Mutate arguments, (2) Side Effects like API calls and routing transitions, (3) Call non-pure functions like Date.now() or Math.random()
  • Redux will call our reducer with an undefined state for the first time. This is our chance to return the initial state. Use ES6 default arguments
  • Reducers don't write to state, rather return new objects
  • It's recommended that reducers be grouped into their own usage/files instead of having one huge reducer
  • Use the redux utility combineReducers to combine your reducers

Store

  • Holds application state;
  • Allows access to state via getState();
  • Allows state to be updated via dispatch(action);
  • Registers listeners via subscribe(listener);
  • Handles unregistering of listeners via the function returned by subscribe(listener).
  • You'll only have a single store in a Redux application
  • Basic store creation
import { createStore } from 'redux'
import todoApp from './reducers'
const store = createStore(todoApp)
const unsub = store.subscribe(() => {});
store.dispatch(addTodo('Learn about actions'))
unsub();

React - Redux

  • mapStateToProps - used by connect() to map redux state into react props
  • mapDispatchToProps - used by connect() to relay actions
  • Use the <Provider store={store}> to expose the store to all containers
  • Asynchronous middleware like redux-thunk or redux-promise wraps the store's dispatch() method and allows you to dispatch something other than actions, for example, functions or Promises

Containers / Smart Components

import { connect } from 'react-redux';
import { actionCreatorMethod } from './my-file-path';

class ComponentName extends Component {
	render() {}
}

export default connect(
  mapStateToProps,
  {actionCreatorMethod}
)(ComponentName);

Middleware

  • Redux Middleware provides a third-party extension point between dispatching an action, and the moment it reaches the reducer
  • Chaining your custom dispatch methods with applyMiddleware: https://redux.js.org/advanced/middleware#the-final-approach
  • redux-promise example for async requests. it allows you to make async requests without having to deal with the delay in response. Different from redux-thunk in that it passes the promise and unwraps it for you.
  • redux-thunk allows you so send a function with multiple actions. This is useful for when you call async functions. Different from redux-promise in that you unwrap the promise in a function.

Packages

  • redux-promise for unwrapping ajax requests or redux-thunk
  • axios for network requests
  • sparklines for charts
  • redux-form
  • tv4 for validating json with json schema

Useful Techniques

  • Spread operator to return a new object {...state, key: newValue}
  • jsonschema.net to generate a json schema