Whether you’re building a small or large-scale application, Redux can help you manage state in a predictable and maintainable way. With its robust ecosystem and large community, Redux is an excellent choice for state management in modern web applications. For instance, in React, to share data among siblings, a state has to live in the parent component. A method for updating this state is provided by the parent component and passed as props to these sibling components. That was a lot to go over in very little words, so don’t feel intimidated if you’re still not entirely sure how all the pieces fit together.
- That means data cannot be sent from a child to a parent; it has to flow downward from the parent to the child.
- In our Redux app, we also want our Reducer to return a new state which should have the action text in there.
- This means if you want your money, your action needs to be passed through the cashier.
- The state is also immutable, which makes it possible to implement difficult tasks like infinite undo and redo.
When you’re deciding whether to use Redux, consider how complex your app’s data is. As your app grows, data interactions can become a mess, and this is where Redux’s structured approach helps. It separates data management from components, which makes code cleaner and stops data from getting chaotic. 💡 Reducers take the previous state of the app and return a new state based on the action passed to it. As pure functions, they do not change the data in the object passed to them or perform any side effect in the application. Given the same object, they should always produce the same result.
When to Mix Redux and Hooks/Context:
With Redux, you can persist some of the app’s state to localStorage and restore it after a refresh. This is the primary reason why you should use Redux, but it’s not the only benefit. Take a look at the list below for a summary of what you stand to gain by using Redux for state management.
But, as we mentioned before, it can introduce a lot of boilerplate into your application due to the verbosity of its API. Because of this, it is recommended to use the Redux Toolkit while using Redux with React. It’s a stateless component that takes in an array of technologies which is denoted by technologies. Reducer is a function in Redux that takes two parameters.
Data Flow in Redux
They are the only way you can send data from your application to your Redux store. The data can be from user interactions, API calls, or even form submissions. There is a central store that holds the entire state of the application. Each component can access the stored state without having to send down props from one component to another. In an app where data is shared among components, it might be confusing to actually know where a state should live.
Redux is a state management library that helps developers manage global state by providing a single source of truth for the entire application. It was created by Dan Abramov and Andrew Clark, and is now maintained by the open-source community. Redux is often used in conjunction with React, but it can be used with other frameworks and libraries as well. This makes it possible to implement arduous tasks like infinite undo and redo. Redux’s structure helps developers handle complex data confidently.
What’s an Action Creator?
You won’t run into data inconsistency problems when accessing a single data source per view. Applications that consist of mostly simple UI changes most often don’t require what is redux used for a complicated pattern like Redux. Sometimes, old-fashioned state sharing between different components works as well and improves the maintainability of your code.
Yet, you don’t always need Redux to manage the state of your application. In this example, we define a Redux store with an initial state that includes a count property. We also define a reducer that modifies the state based on INCREMENT and DECREMENT actions.
Integrating Redux with a UI
Instead of littering your money everywhere in the bank, keep money in one vault. So in Redux, it is advisable to store the application state in a single object managed by the Redux store. It is easy to test Redux apps since functions used to change the state of pure functions. One of the many benefits of Redux is that all data in an application follows the same lifecycle pattern.
Actions are plain JavaScript objects that describe the type of modification being made to the state, and any additional data required to make that modification. Redux is strict about how code should be organized, which makes it easier for someone with knowledge of Redux to understand the structure of any Redux application. This generally makes it easier to maintain, and also helps you segregate your business logic from your component tree. For large scale apps, it’s critical to keep your app more predictable and maintainable. If the same state and action are passed to a reducer, the same result is always produced because reducers are pure functions. The state is also immutable, which makes it possible to implement difficult tasks like infinite undo and redo.
We suggest you practice some more exercises on Redux and build some more complex projects. Also, don’t get afraid of so many libraries available in Redux. Each library has its own specific job that you will understand slowly and gradually.
Make informed decisions about your tools, and understand the trade-offs involved in each decision. Redux helps you deal with shared state management, but like any tool, it has trade-offs. It’s not designed to be the fastest or shortest way to write code.
Step 3: Define a reducer
That way, you can see otherwise invisible states while you’re working with them. In Redux, the store refers to the object that brings actions (that represent what happened) and reducers (that update the state according to those actions) together. Most changes in an application that uses Redux start off with an event that is triggered by a user either directly or indirectly. Events such as clicking on a button, selecting an item from a dropdown menu, hovering on a particular element or an AJAX request that just returned some data. Even the initial loading of a page can be an occasion to dispatch an action.
