[silversmith]

Thunk is not about storing async state in the datastore, it's more akin to multithreading in my opinion.

In backend, you might spin up a thread to do expensive operation like API access, and that thread has it's own database connection, to read and persist data.

With thunk, you dispatch a thunk-ed action to do expensive operation like fetching data from backend, and that action has it's own access to redux in form of `dispatch` / `getState` arguments.

In the end, my component calls `fetchData` function upon mounting. And the logic dealing with making multiple requests due to paging, or re-trying on errors then lives its own life inside a thunk action, independent from the component that spawned it.

[eropple]

How do you test the code being run inside the Redux store? How do you mock your API client?

[silversmith]

A thunk action `fetchData` would return a `(dispatch, getState) => {}` function. You call that with `getState` that would return your fixtures, and verify that `dispatch` gets called as expected. For API, I use jest and mock out imported functions.