Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by acemarke 2921 days ago
Well, the `mapDispatch` example can certainly be simplified. `connect` supports an "object shorthand" - just pass an object full of action creators as the second argument, and they'll all be bound up and passed in as props. So, your `mapDispatch` example can just be:

    const actions = {onTodoClick : toggleTodo};

    export default connect(mapState, actions)(ChooseFontLevel1);

Other than that... there's 1 import line for `connect`, 1 function call to `connect`, and the `mapState` function.

Is that truly too much to write? Also, how does that qualify as "entirely restructuring your code"? Your component is still the same - it's getting data as props. It's just now getting them from a component that was generated by `connect`.

The alternative is to write the store subscription code yourself, by hand, in every component that needs to access the store. I've got some slides at https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/presentations/workshops/re... that show what that would look like, and THAT would truly become tedious and painful.

The point of `connect` is to abstract out the process of subscribing to the store, extracting the data your component needs, and only re-rendering your real component when that data changes.

As for the naming of `mapState`: the word "state", in general, means "data that represents what's going on in my application". So, there's the generic aspect of "state", there's "state that is being stored in my React component", and there's "state that is being kept inside my Redux store". Those are all valid uses of the word "state" (and especially given that the Redux core is entirely independent of React).

The term "action" comes from its original design as an implementation of the Flux architecture (which is part of my point of people not being familiar with where it came from). "Reducers" comes from the `someArray.reduce()` method.

(Also, note that in both of your examples, the constructor isn't actually needed because you're not doing anything meaningful in there, and your `mapState` example isn't making use of the `ownProps` argument and therefore shouldn't declare it for performance reasons.)

1 comments

Easy for you (and me to some extent) to read what you say and see hey yes it could be more simple....

What is simple for any Redux-experienced person is a gigantic cognitive cliff for people who are not experts. I can still remember trying to learn ReactJS and Redux and bailing out on Redux while I tried to make sense of mapping dispatch to props. Redux should not be losing users at that point.

Your earlier post expressed frustration at not being able to get people to be specific about what boilerplate is.... well this is it (or my definition anyway).

IMO, ideally Redux would be nothing more than an object that I instantiate and then call methods and properties on - including defining my reducers and actions. A single object for Redux leaves the question of how to ensure that changes to the Redux store result in a props refresh being pushed down through the component hierarchy, but surely the big brains on the ReactJS project can come up with some other way to handle that behind the scenes rather than me needing to change my code structure.

And may I say I love your work and I'm a big fan of Redux!

Although if I found something that operated like I say - a single object to be instantiated and driven via methods and properties with total immutability, with changes resulting in a props refresh on update, then I'd switch.

Unfortunately, the library you describe wouldn't be Redux at all. Part of the core point of Redux is to separate out the act of describing some event or update that needs to occur, from the process of applying that update. That's what makes time-travel debugging possible, and it allows middleware to modify the actions that are passing through the store. In all honesty, if you want objects with methods, MobX is what you're looking for.

Not quite sure what that "single object" sentence is trying to say, but that also sorta sounds like MobX's wrapping up of components with `observe()` (which ultimately does the same kind of thing `connect` is doing, just in a rather different way).

(Also, fwiw, Redux is completely separate from the React team. Dan Abramov and Andrew Clark, the creators of Redux, _do_ work on React at Facebook now, but Redux is not a Facebook project, and Dan and Andrew are no longer active maintainers. We talk with them a lot, and they obviously have a vested interest in Redux, but it's separate.)

And thanks, appreciate the compliment.