guys. When I go through the documentation of redux-router, I just cannot understand why do we need it?
Here is what the documentation is trying to explain:
React Router is a fantastic routing library, but one downside is that
it abstracts away a very crucial piece of application state — the
current route! This abstraction is super useful for route matching and
rendering, but the API for interacting with the router to 1) trigger
transitions and 2) react to state changes within the component
lifecycle leaves something to be desired.
It turns out we already solved these problems with Flux (and Redux):
We use action creators to trigger state changes, and we use
higher-order components to subscribe to state changes.
This library allows you to keep your router state inside your Redux
store. So getting the current pathname, query, and params is as easy
as selecting any other part of your application state.
As far as I can understand, it is trying to say redux router can keep router state inside redux store so that we can get route info more conveniently.
But within react-router, I can also easily do it.
Like path="messages/:id", I can use this.props.params.id to get the params.
Can someone explain in what scenario redux-router bring its benefit?
Redux (and in general, the flux pattern) is all about having the entire application state stored in one central place. This has the benefit of easier debugging and makes it easier to implement certain features.
If you've ever used the redux-devtools in a react app with react-router, you'll notice that its only of limited use, because you can't replay the entire lifecycle of the application. When the user changes routes, that's not recorded in the redux store. Redux Router keeps the route state in the store.
You could use this for debugging, you could serialise the entire store history and log it elsewhere to replay user sessions. You could hook into it to implement full undo, or log analytics events.
redux-simple-router is a library which could help you understand how to use react router in a redux application.
It is a very simple library stores the URL in redux state and keeps it in sync with any react-router changes.
redux-simple-router compared to redux-router is:
Much smaller and simpler. You don't need to learn another library on top of everything else.
Encourages direct access of react-router APIs. Need server-side rendering, or something else advanced? Just read react-router's docs.
Only stores the current URL and state, whereas redux-router stores the entire location object from react-router.
Follow one of the these 2 examples to get up and running:
redux-simple-router-example
redux-frontend-boilerplate
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've just setup my Redux store in React native app.
I moved to initialize React navigation for my project, i though that, as long as i'm using Redux to manage my app state, then the default option is that redux also is taking care of Navigation, and it should be hooked up to Redux, i opened React navigation docs, it says literally:
"Think twice before you consider doing this, there is an incredibly good chance that you do not need to do t his!"
So, is it a good practice to manage navigation with Redux, or just implement basic navigation the normal way (outside Redux) ?
Thanks in advance.
React Navigation manages its own state internally (using its own redux store I think...). There's no real need to connect react-navigation state to your own app's redux store since they expose API to do everything you might need to even without the navigation prop. Also it looks like they're dropping support for redux integration in the next version so beware of deprecation.
This is one of those cases where people may introduce unnecessary complexity and research into the project just to be happy about how "neat" the code runs even when it doesn't offer any real deliverable.
I have read the official Redux documentation regarding React Router and investigated react-router-redux, redux-router and redux-little-router. I also agree with the rational for redux-little-router: React Router has strong architecture consequences on a React app, and they somehow conflict with Redux.
My feeling about routing is that it has too much importance in the React+Redux ecosystem, whereas it should be treated as a second class citizen. When designing a single page app, we often don't need URLs at all. We still support them to preserve the Web experience (SEO, bookmarking...), but we certainly don't want them to drive the app structure.
What I am thinking of:
External navigation: a route-to-state mapping, with the classic reduced action mechanism. In other words, navigation triggers an action that is dispatched and processed by a custom reducer (with just some help for route mapping and parsing). Once the state is updated, this is React as usual. In particular, there is no mapping between routes and React components, unlike what React Router's Route does and a bit like redux-little-router does.
In app navigation: the current URL is derived from the state, a bit like the view. A kind of renderURL function a Redux middleware is aware of. If a state update generates no change in the URL, well, nothing happens. But if the URL is now different, the middleware reflects the change by pushing it to the history.
With this approach, there is no more Link component. There are only regular Redux actions and a middleware to take care of the navigation as a side effect. Actually, this solution does for navigation what React does for the DOM: a (super-straightforward) URL reconciliation, with the state as the single source of truth.
To illustrate this, consider the Redux Todo list example:
When visiting /SHOW_ALL, an action containing the URL is dispatched. A regular, navigation-dedicated reducer sets visibilityFilter to VisibilityFilters.SHOW_ALL in the state, possibly with some route mapping/parsing helpers. As an alternative, the navigation action could be turned into a SET_VISIBILITY_FILTER action, which is then dispatched and reduced as usual.
A fancy renderURL function is registered at store creation as part of a middleware. It returns "/" + state.visibilityFilter. Again, some route management helpers would be welcome for real life apps.
Now there is no change in the original Todo app. We only add some new code to support a new feature.
The problem is: I can't find anything that support this vision. No article, no react-redux-something package. As a React beginner, either I am a genius or there is something I don't get. Since the later is the most likely (to my uttermost dismay), I would appreciate:
Feedback regarding the "Redux-driven React routing", or whatever it should be named. How is it flawed?
Hints about how I should consider Redux and routing, like relevant articles.
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.
According to the react-router documentation doing a browserHistory.push() inside of a nested react component is the accepted way to change the current route in a react-router app:
https://github.com/rackt/react-router/blob/latest/upgrade-guides/v2.0.0.md#navigating-inside-deeply-nested-components
If a route change is considered a change of state, which I'm not sure whether it is or not hence why I'm asking, would't this be anti-flux?
If a route change isn't considered a change of state, then I guess the documented way is correct.
Can someone weigh in on this?
"State" is kind of an arbitrary term. Ultimately, flux gives you the flexibility to decide where you wan to store state when there are multiple possible places to track it. Some data is managed within its own component, and other data is managed in a flux type store to share with other components. And there are a lot of things that are managed by the browser that you wouldn't keep in your application state--for example, currently selected input box. You could keep them in your flux state if you wanted, or you could keep them in your component state. Or you could let the browser handle that and not worry about it. It all depends on how you want to make these data available across your application.
The URL location is an example of a state which can be maintained by the browser outside of the flux or component state trees. You can, however include it in your store and bind to it if you feel you need it in your application in a way that would be useful. react-router-redux specifically is an example of an implementation that brings the location bar in to the flux state for redux applications.
At the end of the day, however, its up to you to determine if having that information available in your flux state is useful or not. Pedantically speaking, yes, you should have all of your data in flux to have the most pure flux implementation, but that's not really what you should be optimizing for.
The documentation for react-router is perfectly correct to use in a flux application, but if you're using something like redux, it's at least nice to have a real react-router integration so that it doesn't become something of an exception on how your application deals with state.