I've been using Redux for most of my React applications.
I think I will start using XState as I don't have to use effects as a plugin all the time.
And I think is a more complete pattern.
One thing that I want to understand is it's connection with React (hooks and classes) and it's interaction with reactive programming in general:
Can I (and should I) use XState context as Redux data store in the same way, having a single source of truth on a shared by React Components way? Will my components be able to "connect" and "mapToProps" the XState context and rerender only when those values changes and not every time the state machine state changes?
From what I understand Redux lacking side effects is so it can adhere to a pure functional paradigm. But that breaks with side effects usage, that is a lot of times needed in web apps or games for example.
Thanks in advance!
XState can basically manage your global state in Redux (or other state management libraries) if you want to, but it won't replace connecting with React as Redux does. You should view it as an extension to Redux and you would still need to follow the patterns used in Redux, but use XState to perform them. A few examples:
Redux state can be represented as anything, so it can be a XState machine state + XState machine context.
Redux actions should basically trigger XState machine transitions. They can also trigger async actions (https://xstate.js.org/docs/guides/communication.html#invoking-promises), so you might not need something like redux-thunk to deal with that. You actions will become much simpler, but the actual handling is moved to the machine.
Redux reducers usually return a new state, therefore they are the outcome of a XState transition.
You can probably find a way to connect this all together (did a similar thing with Vuex recently). The XState machine would simply be a singleton called from Redux entities, but you would not "embed" the machine inside Redux.
You would also still need to use the react-redux tools as before and the machine would never really be exposed to the actual React components (except you want to use XState machines for local state as well).
Related
What is the basic difference between react and redux? is react and redux is same? why we should use redux? Finally why it's called react-redux?
I want to know this i just confused between this two.
You must be pretty new to web development. First of all, welcome !
React and redux are pretty different beasts, but have often been used together to make state management easier in React apps.
React is a front-end web framework, it allows you to create a wide range of web apps using JSX (React's way of fusing Javascript and HTML). This is a gross oversimplification, I encourage you to read the documentation.
Redux is a state management library. With it, you can define one or many stores, containing a state (basically an object that holds any data you need), actions (methods to alter or retrieve the current value of the store) and to subscribe the state's changes at a global level. Again, the Redux documentation should have most of the answers you're looking for.
React and redux are often used together, mainly through the use of the react-redux package, since Redux offers a global, reactive state, enabling you to share data between React components anywhere in your app without having to pass props.
Now tough, you could achieve similar functionnality without Redux entirely, using React's own Hook and Context APIs. Although the logic behind these is a bit more involved, it allows for far more flexibility.
I am building a web app where redux is configured and app is fairly large.
Now I want to store some user preferences which will be available as part of an API respopse.
As this data is required to the majority of components I am planning to store data in the context and wrap application using the context.
I have Few questions regarding approach.
Will considering context impact the performance?
As Redux is already configured which internally uses the Context. So should we continue to use redux for user data.
Is it good practice to use Redux and Context together.
Context and Redux are very different tools that solve different problems, with some overlap.
Context is not a "state management" tool. It's a Dependency Injection mechanism, whose only purpose is to make a single value accessible to a nested tree of React components. It's up to you to decide what that value is, and how it's created. Typically, that's done using data from React component state, ie, useState and useReducer. So, you're actually doing all the "state management" yourself - Context just gives you a way to pass it down the tree.
Redux is a library and a pattern for separating your state update logic from the rest of your app, and making it easy to trace when/where/why/how your state has changed. It also gives your whole app the ability to access any piece of state in any component.
In addition, there are some distinct differences between how Context and (React-)Redux pass along updates. Context has some major perf limitations - in particular, any component that consumes a context will be forced to re-render, even if it only cares about part of the context value.
So, yes, you can use them both in the same app, in the same way you can use a hammer and a screwdriver together on the same construction job.
For more details, see my posts:
Why React Context is Not a "State Management" Tool (and Why It Doesn't Replace Redux)
React, Redux, and Context Behavior
A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior
Will considering context impact the performance?
Since you want to share user preferences that (I guess) do not change often, you could use a React context to share that data.
But performance issues arise when you put multiple different data in one React context that update at different rates. This is because every component that uses the context will be rerendered even if the part of the context it is interessted in did not change. In this case you can split the context and use one context for each part of the data.
Since you want to use the context to share an application state, you should use Redux. In Redux you use selectors to select a part of the application state. This useSelector hook is implemented in a way that it only triggers a rerender of the component if the selected part changes. You can even pass it an equality function if you want to change the way state change is detected.
As Redux is already configured which internally uses the Context. So should we continue to use redux for user data.
I would say: yes, continue with Redux.
Since you already use Redux you should not spread your application state management over different concepts. Put the user settings in the Redux store (like any other application state) and don't handle them special.
Is it good practice to use Redux and Context together
Well, Redux is based on the React context. So if you use Redux it is already a good practice.
If you mean using both for application state management, I think you should go the Redux or the React context way. Mixing them makes it harder to understand where state is managed.
I have been working in React for past 6 months and do not have any experience with Redux yet. Though I have worked with context api and useReducer hook. I need to convert an existing application to react which will have around 100-120 components. My question is about the choice of state management. With the rise of context api and useReducer hook, Can I rely on these two only Or Redux library is still a better choice ? Articles that I found for comparison are from late 2019 so I couldn't decide.
Please guide
Redux is still a much better choice for large scale.
Let's assume you have 10000 global state variables in the global store. And you need to change one.
Context API
It will rerender all of its consumer components which is unnecessary.
Redux
It allows us to selectively rerender components that subscribed to changed values.
So
Context API is good for small scale but not good for large scale.
Fundamentals are still same for context API before and after useReducer.
I think useReducer and contextAPI should be good enough even for large applications if you don't want the time travel that Redux provides out of box, as a by-product of its design.
For large applications, one could have a large state (or multiple reducers combined via combiner) in Redux, and yet avoid re-rendering of components. This is because components are rendered based on parts of state that it depends upon, using the mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps magic. With contextAPI and useReducer one designs global state by breaking it up into Providers such that only the sub-tree affected by a particular sub-part of global state is passed that part of global state via its own provider.
Check this out: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/application-state-management-with-react
Which technique is better for state management in react app?
Actually I want to create a big app where I've to manage my state which technique is optimal for state management context, Redux or react custom hook?
I am personally more inclined towards Redux. But if you are a beginner trying to learn Redux you might have some hard time until you understand it. Once you get it you will also like it. Rather than building your own custom hook, It's better to use Redux as if anything goes wrong/you are struck with something, you have community to support and You can also dispatch async calls using some middleware libs like redux-thunk, etc. You can use Redux with forms as well. I guess if you end building your custom hooks you might end up wasting time, taking care of all these.
Of course, it is better to go ahead with Redux, because it is easier to handle large applications with Redux. It has only a single store, which is basically a javascript object. You can divide the store into many pieces, each piece will be for a particular part of the application. All these pieces will be joined together using the combineReducers function provided by redux.
React is a state management library and with the release of React hooks and massive improvements to React context this method of state management has been drastically simplified.
I think in 99% of the situations we do not need redux and add one layer of complexity to project.
For big scale app maybe redux is better choice. but if you choose React for state management you need good information about some concepts and this concepts is:
Local state vs global state(some component needs local state and putting all of their state in global state leads to a lot of problems)
react context and prop drilling problem and How to use React Context effectively
react hooks especially useReducer and useContext
immutable state
You would always need to ask yourself the question: Do i need an additional library?
Redux is on its decline in popularity, due to improvements on Reacts native state management. There is a reason for that!
If you want to work for a company thats not brand new, there is a chance you have to use redux. I was fortunate enough to convince my team to use our own state management library build only with React.useState under the hood.
If your application state logic is quite simple, meaning: states are mostly local, shared state are mostly between parent-child relationship and different states are not heavily depending on each other, then I recommend only using React useState and useReducer (in case you like to use reducers).
Once your application state is getting complicated, you need to have some sort extra stuff of global state management.
The most important thing you need to know about React.useState is, that the returned setState function is your connection to that components state. Lets assume we can take that function out of the component and use it somewhere else. This way you have a function to update your state from outside of your component.
export let exportedStateSetter;
const Component = () => {
const [state, setState] = useState();
useEffect(() => {
exportedStateSetter = setState;
return () => exportedStateSetter = undefined;
});
return <div>{state}</div>
};
In the example above, you can now import the exportedStateSetter and use it somewhere else to update the state of this Component.
!This is not a best pracitce example, this is a simple visualization.
When you think very critically about this, you will realize that now you know how to set a components state from outside of a component, you know how to set states globally.
I stringly recommend using this approach to either build your own global state library or use some that i have created based on what i explained:
npm install --save react-global-state-hook // simple
npm install --save rx-global // complex
To wrap it up: Dont use Redux, if not required by a job. You can always use Redux conventions, by seperating state into stores, update state with a reducer and actions that interact with the state. For that you can use native React state management, if not only React.useState when used properly. React provides you with everything you need and everything you need to build yourself.
I had the best developer experiences with my own libraries that evolved over time. It forces you to understand state management in general and the framework you are using.
Im open for any feedback on the 2 libraries and if you have any questions regarding state, please feel free to keep posting.
I am new to React so please excuse me if this is a noob question but I really could not find the answer in the DOCs or elsewhere.
Let's say I have two buttons with a counter that share the state but are far away from each other in terms of the placement in the UI.
The documentation says the common owner component for both buttons should own the state. It makes sense if the components are next to each other like in the example but what if my buttons are each part of a different UI group and are far away in terms of nesting? My state holder would be the root of the document and I would have to pass a handler function down through many layers. And what if I need to add new component somewhere else that also needs to know the state? Would I have to modify all the parent components in the way to pass the state down? That is tremendously impractical.
Without React I would have some global Subscribe/Publish pattern like jQuery Observer and all UI elements could subscribe/publish to it regardless of their nesting position.
How does React solve this?
Related question: If I need to load/save the state to DB, how do I pass a reference of the controller (or Whatever) to each React component that stores the state?
1 for global state you may use REDUX
Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps
for connect/subscribe component with that state ,you should use react-redux
If components are far away in terms of nesting, you may connect/subscribe them to redux store, and take only neccessary part of state. They will update if only neccessary part is changed.
article that explains how you can do your case
to learn how to use redux you can watch this videos from creator of redux (Dan Abramov)
1.getting-started-with-redux
2.building-react-applications-with-idiomatic-redux
3.I definitely recommend to you discordapp rectiflux channel. because you allways can ask any question online.(there you can find contributors of that tools)
2 alternative way that less verbose then redux is MobX
MobX is a battle tested library that makes state management simple and scalable by transparently applying functional reactive programming (TFRP). The philosophy behind MobX is very simple:
Anything that can be derived from the application state, should be derived. Automatically.
I suggest to look at the Flux stores. In short, stores are like model in your application. You can listen to change (subscribe) and also modify their properties (publish). You can see how it was done in example app.
A better option is to go with Redux.
Redux is enabling use cases like yours in a way simpler fashion :)
It will help you with all the state and make your life much easier.
Some good resources for learning:
The Redux Website
Video courses from Dan Abramov, the creator [Free]
Awesome course on Udemy [Not free]
Building Applications with React and Redux in ES6
And finally take a look at this youtube series [Free]
Managing state in the middle layers of your app should be avoided where possible. This data belongs in a store, which holds the global state of the app. Then each component accesses the state via its props.
The naïve approach to get the data down to the component is to pass the store through all the layers of your app "manually", i.e. through props.
Smarter alternatives exist, which use connected components, that access the global state through the context (as opposed to the props). Typically, the presentational component (your button component) is wrapped in a container component that handles this connection to the store, then passes the data in via props.
There are numerous frameworks that facilitate this process, links to which are already provided in the other answers.
If you are trying to share simple states, try this ( I am the author): react-provide-state
Otherwise I will recommend Redux. It has become the most popular tool for managing application states.
In the applications being working on, we use Redux to manage the main application states and almost all other states. But we use 'react-provide-state' for simple, UI only states like Modal, Checkbox states.