In this case, our ‘counter’ was ‘incremented’, so
we write the action type as ‘counter/incremented’. We may very well maintain the internal state of the components inside them, but as and when an application grows bigger, it may have to share some state between components. This is not just only to show them in the view, but also to manage or update them or perform some logic based on their value.

We’ll take the cart component which displays the number of items in a user’s cart. The state of the cart component will consist of all the items the user has added to the cart and the total number of those items. At all times the application is up and running, this component has to show the updated number of items in the user’s cart.

Functional programming and Redux

Yes, it’s possible to write a complete application using nothing but a framework. But as your application gets more complex, with more and more components, using just a framework to manage this can get very tricky. It automatically logs every action your app performs, and it allows time traveling – you can click on any past action and jump to that point in time. Redux also supports the concept of middleware, where you may bind customized function calls on every action dispatch. Such examples include an automatic event logger, interception of certain actions, etc.

why redux

As the official binding library for React and Redux, React Redux has a large community of users. This makes it easier to ask for help, learn about best practices, use libraries that build on top of React Redux, and reuse your knowledge across different applications. If performance is a concern, the best way to improve performance is to skip unnecessary re-renders, so that components only re-render when their data has actually changed.

It is the Official Redux UI Bindings for React​

It’s intended to help answer the question “When did a certain slice of state change, and where did the data come from?”, with predictable behavior. It also adds some indirection to your code, and asks you to follow certain restrictions. What to learn can be an overwhelming what is redux question for a JavaScript developer. It helps to narrow the range of options by learning one thing at a time and focusing on problems you find in your work. If you do not have problems with state management, you might find the benefits of Redux harder to understand.

why redux

Some of that complexity is obvious while many other unobvious gotchas are hidden and waiting for you to trip on it. Even then it is worth checking out alternatives such as MobX or react-sweet-state. Following in the steps of Flux, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, Redux
attempts to make state mutations predictable by imposing certain
restrictions on how and when updates can happen.

Redux Libraries and Tools​

Emphasizing “one container component at the top” in Redux examples was a mistake. Create container components by connecting them when it’s convenient. Whenever you feel like you’re duplicating code in parent components to provide data for same kinds of children, time to extract a container.

A method for updating this state is provided by the parent component and passed as props to these sibling components. Even though Redux solves our state management problem, it is time-consuming to use, has a difficult learning curve, and introduces a whole new layer of complexity to our application. When combined with React Hooks, we have a state management solution that is less time-consuming to set up, has an easier learning curve, and requires minimal code. This also eliminates the need to write more code, which is awesome in my opinion. When working with functional programming, it’s important to understand concepts like pure functions, anonymous functions, closures and higher order functions just to mention a few.

Redux FAQ: React Redux

For non-connected components, you may want to check what props are being passed in. A common issue is having a parent component re-bind a callback inside its render function, like . That creates a new function reference every time the parent re-renders. It’s generally good practice to only bind callbacks once in the parent component’s constructor.

  • It’s more practical to side-chain Redux directly into a lower-level component in this case.
  • By logging actions and state, it is easy to understand coding errors, network errors, and other forms of bugs that might come up during production.
  • Context has been around with React for quite a while, but it has changed significantly since its inception.

Then we increment the noOfItemInCart by 1, update the cart array by adding the new object passed in the action.payload shown below, and then finally return the updated object. Whenever we dispatch an action with a certain type, we need to make sure to have appropriate reducers to handle that action. In the following section, we will dive deep into the core concepts of Redux – the store, actions and reducers.

The other functionality “Products” also require user authentication information because the “Cart” operations will be accessible when the user is authenticated/signed-in. To get user authentication information at this part will require alot of state/props passing from “Users” component to a different section of the application “Products”. This is when Redux comes in picture, it provides a central store (stores entire application state) which is then available to the entire application.

why redux

Internally, Redux uses the React context API that allows it to pass the store along your component tree. The connect() function takes two primary arguments, both optional. The first, mapStateToProps, is a function you provide to pull data from the store when it changes, and pass those values as props to your component. The process of subscribing to the store, checking for updated data, and triggering a re-render can be made more generic and reusable. A UI binding library like React-Redux handles the store interaction logic, so you don’t have to write that code yourself. Users have authentication implemented where they can sign-up and sign-in and the users can view the dashboard only when they are authenticated.

Links and References​

This state tree mutation diagram demonstrates how a change deep in a tree requires changes all the way up. While it is possible to write Redux store subscription logic by hand, doing so would become very repetitive. In addition, optimizing UI performance would require complicated logic. The current Redux application state lives in an object called the store . “Reducer” functions get their name because they’re similar to the kind of callback function you pass to the Array.reduce() method.

why redux