Redux: Data Source implementation - javascript

I'm newbie in react and redux.
Question: what is the best way to implement "datasource" (similar to kendo-ui datasource) in redux?
I've tried to store all of my widgets datasources in one place (i've created datasource reducer) and "bind" datasources to it's widgets (like table widget, listview, combobox etc). Datasources must have it's own api (like addFilter, addSort, getFiltered etc) and also store applied filters and data too.
I want to store all of datasources in redux store (that's why i need to create datasource and dispatch it's creation before widget is created).
The problem is when i create react-redux connector to my "smart" widget's container-component i need to send my datasource with props but at this moment datasource is not created.
If i send dummy initial datasource (without dispatch it's creation and data filling) and then dispatch it and fill data to it on componentDidMount - my widget's render function called twice
I think i need some kind of "wrapper" function but at now i have no idea how to do that.
Maybe there is some examples of how to implement "datasources functionality"?

Just let render be called twice. It's the right thing to do in react-land.
Stuff has changed. Let's re-render and let the diff-engine do it's thing.
You need to fully accept the action->reducer->smart-component dichotomy.

Data source seems like a wrong abstraction in Redux. You don't want to conflate retrieving the state from the state tree (selectors), fetching it (action creators) and describing mutations (reducers). If you'd rather have a data source-like abstraction, you shouldn't need Redux.

Related

React - Fetch data in the parent or inside its childs?

Note: I am not using Redux (only Context + Hooks)
Introduction
I have a screen "Profile", that renders a TabView.
This TabView, renders two components as scenes:
UserPosts
UserInformation
My Profile screen, fetches the user data from my database, as it has to render some stuff that depends on this data.
Also, it is passed down via props to my "UserInformation" component, as it just renders the user data. So... there is no data fetching in my "UserInformation" component.
In the other hand, my "UserPosts" component is responsible of fetching the user posts, as it renders a component "UserPostsGrid" which renders those posts with pagination (endless FlatList).
Note: Data fetching is performed in custom hooks, not directly inside
the component (also, those hooks manages the respective stateful
data).
Problem
The main problem comes when I need to refresh the user data and the user posts when the user pull-to-refresh inside the "Profile" screen.
There is no problem for this screen to fetch the user data, as I have said before the "Profile" screen is responsible of that action.
But the posts are the stateful data of my child...
Multiple solutions?
I have thought to solve this problem using the current solution:
React.forwardRef() + React.useImperativeHandle()
With this, I will be able to pass a ref to my "UserPosts" and use imperative programming for accessing the data fetching method: userPostsRef.current.refreshPosts();
I have never seen other scenarios for solving this problem like this, but it should work. Instead, other coders implement a ContextProvider to handle all the data and be able to access it wherever they want. The main problem I notice here is: extra memoization + extra re-renders.
Another solution might be to implement all the data fetching inside the parent, and pass the respective callbacks via props to the child. The main problem I notice here is that we are creating some kind of "God Component" and we might have multiple lines of code...
My question
Is it an anti-pattern or a bad practice to implement the first solution ?
To answer your question:
Yes, it is an antipattern in React, because React is built around the idea that you specify the state of your app, and then let React render the components depending on this given state.
If something should change, you are supposed to specify a new state that represents the difference to the old state.
Refs should only be used if there is no other option. Basically, if you use Refs you say "I don't want to use React for this specific part of my code".
As always, imperative code using refs should be avoided in most cases
To use state instead of commands:
I would approach this kind of problem by trying to translate the imperative action into some state of information.
The user says "get me the latest data", that is a command, i.e. imperative.
Now I would ask "what is the user telling me about the state of the data right now ?"
An answer would be "this data is not up to date anymore", and this can be expressed as a state, and passed around via props.
A solution for your problem:
E.g. you might use a prop needsUpdate, which is set to true when the data should be updated, and to false when fetched.
To avoid unnecessary renders (setting needsUpdate = false would cause another call of e.g. useEffect, even if nothing happens there), I probably would use a child component prop like latestUpdateRequest and a child state like latestUpdate which holds a counter or timestamp, and then compare if(latestUpdateRequest > latestUpdate).
To inform the parent about the change just pass a callback function like dataUpdated() as a prop.

Manage Data with React Components

I am trying to build a new react app and I have some question about the architecture.
I have 2 components:
Adress
CreditCard
Each Component has several inputs and api functions to get the data and also to update it.
When I use both components in one Page, how can I trigger an update for both components?
Page
Address
CreditCard
Submit Button
The Submit Button should trigger the Update function and wait until both are finished.
I tried to give a function from the Page to the child components via props, but I think this is the wrong way.
Redux
For complex interactions between different components you can use redux. Redux holds the state of your entire application and can only be updated with actions.
An action will trigger a reducer. A reducer returns a new version of the state with what ever update you set there.
Treat redux some what like a database, do not store things multiple times and keep a good separation of concerns. There's an awesome library that lets you aggregate and manipulate data called reselect.
Reselect
This library will let you take several parts of the store and combine them for your needs in any given scenario.
Conclusion
To conclude, these's libraries are part of a stack I've been using for about 2.5 years (reselect only 1 year). I've found them very powerful for handling complex data. That being said there are other options like graphql, apollo or relay.

Vuejs - Get different date in the same component

I have created several components (tables, selects, etc) and all use the same methods to get API information.
The purpose is to use these components on different pages of the application and as such, so that one can use the same component (eg table) regardless of the information it receives, I have created a number of methods to allow this.
However, to apply these methods to all components requesting the API, you would have to repeat a lot of code, and as such the goal is to create these methods globally.
After a search I found three ways to do it, with Plugins, Mixins and Vuex. However I do not know what is the most ideal way to do this.
Any suggestion?
Go with Vuex.
Create a centralized store where your components interact with its data using getters, actions and mutations, and the store knows how to interact with the API.
For example, your table component can be dumb, and just expect a :data=someData that the component that initializes the table passes to it, then it just renders whatever was passed. This someData can be mapped to a Vuex getter (or directly to an item in the store state) in the parent component.
When your component needs to have something submitted to the API, it can trigger an event the parent will pick up and call the appropriate action or mutation on the store, the store will know what to call in the API to do this action. So, even your parent isn't completely aware on how the API works, just your abstraction of if, represented by your Vuex store.
I have created a very simple todos application last week for another question here, feel free to have a look, uses Vue, Vuex and saves the data to Firebase. It also doesn't implement REST as it could, but it isn't too hard to change the store to use the proper REST methods get, post, put, delete etc.
All the relevant code of this application in in App.vue and store.js, with one line in main.js just to add the store to the Vue instance.
Vuex will help with shared/own components state. If your problem is how to manage shared API call Vuex persi won't tackle that problem directly. It will help you once you get that data accessible to your components.
That said, you can create a module to do the API call and retrieve data, say:
http.js
export const getUser = async id => {
const response = await fetch(`/user/${id}`)
return await response.json()
}
export const getContent = async id => {
const response = await fetch(`/content/${id}`)
return await response.json()
}
This is a solution that will help you both with or without Vuex, now you can call those methods from anywhere.

Should data go in a redux state tree?

I am a bit lost on what to keep in the state tree of Redux.
I saw two conflicting statements on what to store in the state tree(s).
React doc tell us that only user input should be stored in state trees.
The original list of products is passed in as props, so that's not state. The search text and the checkbox seem to be state since they change over time and can't be computed from anything. And finally, the filtered list of products isn't state because it can be computed by combining the original list of products with the search text and value of the checkbox.
Redux doc tells us that we often should store UI state and data in the single state tree:
For our todo app, we want to store two different things:
The currently selected visibility filter;
The actual list of todos.
You’ll often find that you need to store some data, as well as some UI state**, in the state tree. This is fine, but try to keep the data separate from the UI state.
So React tells that we should not store data (I am talking about data of the todos) and, for me, Redux tells the opposite.
In my understand I would tend on the React side because both React and Redux aims to predict a UI state by storing:
all what can't be computed (eg: all human inputs) and are part of the UI:
checkbox value
input value
radio value
...
All minimal data that could be use to build a query and send it to the API/database that will return the complete user profil, friends lists, whatever...:
user Id
creation dates range
items Ids
...
For me that excludes all database/API results because:
that stands on data level
could be computed by sending the right (and computed by pure reducers) query.
So what is your opinion here?
React documentation about the View Component state, but Redux documentation about the Application state. So, there is no conflicts between definitions.
If we talk about Redux - you make all your components without state (and transform stateless root component to stateful with help of react-redux's connect function). If you have large response from the server and you show your data with pagination / filters, you can treat your application state as what you see on screen and not put all data in Redux store, only what you need to render (for example, 100 rows to show page and total number of rows to show pagination). There is no restriction for this. The whole data you can put into another place. For example, in another data container in web-worker (I make a full request in web-worker and fetch from there only needed data to display).
Added after question edited:
The original list of products is passed in as props, so that's not state.
In that example, the reason why list of products isn't state - it's already in props. It means that the one of parent components have this as state.
I feel that the problem is that originally Redux was pushed really hard, and some people were so purists, that they argued for separating everything to Redux and re-rendering the whole application on every change. And then we ended up with this response of the creator, which actually only added a confusion, because redux was and still is a de-facto standard for new react applications, and a lot of tutorials assume it.
So, I feel that people are pressured from each side, and often they do some things without real understanding why they should (especially newcomers creating constants, actions and reducers). So, for those who read it, please start without redux, and keep it just in local state (but try to keep in some component like DataContainer).
For those who need redux, rule thumb is to put all async data (so all requests go through redux), and data which is needed for independent components. If components obviously located nearby, keep it in a local state and pass as props.
Redux is a very helpful library, but it's power is needed only after you start to have at least several routes, different query options and some complex UI. Before that there is a good chance that you are overengineering (but, of course, if you are sure that you will exceed this size, feel free to start with Redux). And again, you'll literally never will want to put your slider or small dropdown position in the store -- react's state serves perfectly for it.

Flux store emitting changes to specific react components rather than all components.

Struggling to find or come up with an elegant answer to this one:
If I have multiple dynamic react components that are listening to one flux store to update their child components is it possible to emit changes to specific components rather than emitting changes to all the components that are registered to listen to changes on that store?
E.G: A dynamic component has a button and when clicked its tells the flux store to send some data to API. The dynamic component will it update its child view depending on the response and change emitted by the flux store. But since all the dynamic components are listening to the store they will all update their child views which is the undesired behaviour. Ideally the flux store could identify which component to emit the change to, or the components can identify that change is not for them.
Is this possible? Or does it go against flux principles?
I don't know if it violate flux architecture, but it seems not leveraging some beauties of it.
The beauty of a simple emit change (without change detail) is that a store wouldn't need to have explicit knowledge on views, also, with the React Virtual Dom framework, it shouldn't cost too much performance hit.
To further optimize the performance, you can implement shouldComponentUpdate on your React view (base on the differences in it's own properties), to avoid triggering the tree-diff algorithm.
See this: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/component-specs.html
== Add more info ==
In more traditional MVC, the model will emit changes to a particular source and with particular details, e.g.
this.emit({
details: { x: 'x', y: 'y' },
source: objectA
)};
The view (or controller) that receive this needs such detail to update it's Dom, you will call the update(changes.details) instead of the initial render() method because Dom manipulation is expensive.
ReactJS 'solved' this by having another virtual Dom layer, which use pure Javascript to compute the 'optimal' differences in Dom manipulation, so in React, you never have a method call update(), you will always call render() base on current state of the view, and React does the optimization for you.
So using Flux with React, your store can just emit change without any details and the views that listen to it can just render with 'optimal' Dom manipulation (so if it's state hasn't been changed, there will be no Dom manipulation).
But of course, you will say in this case React will still trigger the virtual Dom diff computation, which still cost something. So to further optimize it, you can implement shouldComponentUpdate on a view that contains big sub-tree (base on it's own state), to avoid React to run the diff computation.
The beauty of emit a simple change, besides easier code, is that Store can be pretty much decoupled from view.
For example if you trigger specific change details for particular views, then you will need to remove or change code in store(s) when the view is not listening the that store anymore.
It does not go against flux principle but beware not having only one big store, sometime it's better to split in several tiny store.
But I think I understand your use case, one store containing a collection of similar objects (like a backbone collection).
So lets say your store receive a new object or an array of new object (or things to update in your store), you have a register function which will add this object (or update) to your store.
For sure this object has an id field (or something similar). Then for each new object of your array you just received you'll emit the id.
And your view are binded to their id as change event. Basically you use your store like an array, when the array is change you emit the key as event. Your view listen to this key/id and then get the specific data from your store still using this id/key.
Hope it's clear, let me know.

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