The Boundaries of UI State and Application State - reactjs

I have trouble coming up or finding the boundaries of the so called "UI State".
Imagine the example of an issue tracker:
We have a list of "issue cards", which each contain:
A simple icon that represents the progress (i.e. open, closed)
The description text of the issue (a simple <p/> element)
A single Action button that changes d =epending on the state of the issue: "Assign to myself" or "Mark as done".
A button that opens a context menu (AKA right-click menu). This menu has a list of a variety of action buttons. Depending on the
state, some actions are greyed out and can not be clicked / or are
just not shown. Like "Close Case", if the case is already closed.
If you could categorize each of these items into UI-State vs. Application State, it would help me understand the boundaries.
More practically: How would you divide this little example application into containers and presentational components?
My interpretation: 1. and 2. are just presentational, 3. and 4. are stateful. Is this right? How would I structure this as containers and components?
Thank you very much!

All of listed examples are examples of application state, where UI is determined by persistent data that is received from the backend.
UI state usually refers to UI component local state that is determined by user actions, e.g. window position, active tab, unsubmitted form values, etc. Depending on the case, UI state may be lifted up and stored somewhere (persistent storage or URL) or be discarded.

if I want to implement this project I would act like this :
a component for managing all children components
a store to managing model, data and fields
a component for displaying icon and description text and button
a component for context menu
please consider that if you are using MVVM pattern, be sure that all responsibilities of actions are done by store and for changing some properties use observable fields
and if not use state in manager component and pass via proprs in children.

Related

How to select items in app and updating the state in react

I want to build a simple app like in picture attached with react js, I just cannot find the right idea of:
How to "select" photos(or item) in an application and have the "cart"-like component appear at the bottom when at least one photo/item is selected(and close and deselect all already selected photo/items) and expand the cart-like component at the bottom when clicked to show what's been already selected.
What is the best approach to this?
P.S I'm new to react with a big idea in mind xD
app's view
This question definitely needs more information, but I will try to point you in the right direction. There are hundred of ways to create the UI/functionality you are describing but here is a very generic overview;
The "items" (Img1-6) looks like a grid of ShopItem components, possibly in a CSS Grid / flexbox. Each ShopItem would probably make use of an onClick method to "do something" when it is clicked - this may involve updating a state (using the useState react hook) somewhere which tells you if a ShopItem is checked or not. It could also potentially use a callback method to do something in the parent when the items are checked.
I imagine that each ShopItem may own its own "checked" state or may update a global state (Such as Zustand or Redux) or a Context (React) when it is toggled on and off. The checked state of a ShopItem would also inform the UI of the component.
The "cart-like" component could be looking at the global state/context/callback from the item component, and could change based on its value and how many checked items there are. (Eg/ checkedItems !== 0 ? show : don't show)
This is just one way in which this UI can be built, if you would like a more specific solution, please edit your question to include code snippets and what you've already tried.

Collecting state from multiple child tabs

Let's say we want to create a new Task. We have 2 categories of information we want to collect from the user for creating a new Task: general params, action params.
To make it easily separated we are separating between them with tabs. so each gets its own react component, both stored in different react-tabs tabs.
In the parent component I have a save button and I want that at any given time, the user could click it to send the entire state from both the tabs' state to the server.
While I could forward event handlers from the parent to the children (as suggested by other questions on this topic)... doing it for each of the 20 controls (dropdowns, textfields, date time pickers) in each of them requires a lot of boilerplate code and seems unreasonable.
I'm looking for a best practice for this situation. Thanks!

Highlight a single button instance in a complex React page

My page is composed of hierarchy of classes and many reusable components. Multiple instances of a button component can exist anywhere in the page and on click they fire actions that populate different types of data in a common sidebar list component.
The requirement is to highlight the button that was last clicked to load the data in that sidebar list. Of course, it also means to remove highlighting from the previous button. Since these button can exist in different components, I cannot manage state in one parent component.
I am not able to find a solution in pure React. I don't want to use jQuery rather just stick to React. Note I do use Redux in the app though and would be fine with leveraging Redux state if required.
You should most definitely use Redux. You'll need to create a variable in Redux that gets updated whenever an action takes place that would require you to highlight the button on the page. Then use conditional styling for the button based on that variable.

React Redux Components Communication Pattern

I am looking for a good code pattern to allow some communication between components, when using React & Redux.
Most likely this communication should be done via redux, like many articles suggest. (like this one, for example).
However, there are some situations when using the store would be a bit of a hack rather then using it for state management. These special cases are usually when you need to give a command to a component, like show or hide.
I will give an example:
Lets say that we have a <Tooltip /> component which all it does is render some help icon, that when clicked, opens a tooltip popup.
And lets say that we have more than one in a page, but we want to make sure that only one is open at a given time. So if tooltip A is open, and the user clicks on tooltip B, then B should open and A should close.
Here are some patterns that I thought might be relevant to implement this requirement:
Using Redux: We could have in the store some state for these tooltips:
{
showTooltip: "A" // the ID of the tooltip to show
}
This means that we have to connect the tooltips to the redux store, and check for each tooltip if it's ID is the one that should be opened, and when the user clicks on the tooltip icon, we dispatch an action to set the opened tooltip.
Using additional event mechanism: We can use an additional event mechanism to Redux, like emitter.
In this case we can fire an event whenever a tooltip is about to be opened, and all other tooltips can listen and hide themselves once they get such an event.
I have to say that it seems to me that maybe having two event mechanisms in the app seems a bit redundant, but on the other hand, using redux store to communicate with components seems a bit overkill.
Would love to hear some opinions about this issue.
The React and Redux world generally encourages representing your app's behavior as state. For example, rather than an imperative $("#someModal").show() command, you might save a flag value somewhere that says {modalVisible : true}.
There's numerous examples of using state to drive modals and popups. A typical implementation would store the values for a single modal or a list of modals in state somewhere (either in a parent component or in Redux), and then render modal components as appropriate based on those values, such as: {type : "notificationPopup", level : "warning", message : "Something happened!"}. The basic approach works whether you're storing the data in React, Redux, MobX, or something else.
For specific examples, see Dan Abramov's answer to "How can I display a modal dialog in Redux?", Dave Ceddia's article "Modal Dialogs in React", the article "Scalable Modals with React and Redux". I also have other articles that demonstrate modal management in the React Component Patterns#Modal Dialogs and Redux Techniques#UI and Widget Implementations sections of my React/Redux links list.

Flux: Handling Modal windows

How should Modal window be shown while using the Flux implementation. I can have the Component update its state to display a modal and close it once done. A save in the modal would trigger a action and update the store. But the modal would not that it needs to be closed. I would then need to emit a different event or have the store store the state of the modal.
For me it is perfectly fine to store the state of the modal in the store. On save event, just use a boolean value to say whether or not the modal should be displayed.
Your store doesn't need to have a single attribute, it can be more complex. Like having an array and a boolean.
When the save happens, just update your array and put a boolean open=false that you will use in your render method to not render the modal anymore. You don't need 2 actions to do that, one action can update your store model + update the boolean to false.
The complexity here is to know what to put in stores. How to organise your state... This can become quite complex over time. Until now I have found great success by using autonomous components, with their own stores, like widgets. You can find more details here.
In a more general way, you can put layout properties in stores. Like cursor or mouse position, opened modals, whether mouse is over some element or not...

Resources