This is the primary reason why you should use Redux, but it’s not the only benefit. Take a look at the list below for a summary of what you stand to gain by using Redux for state management. We’ll be implementing a similar example to the login component above but this time in Redux.
Given the same object, they should always produce the same result. Context provides a way to pass data through the component tree without having to pass props down manually at every level. Essentially, the React Context API is React’s way of managing state in multiple components that are not directly connected.
Redux vs. React Hooks and the Context API
We will also see how some of its core building blocks work, such as store, actions, and reducers and how they all come together and make Redux the global state management library that it is. As you can see in the example above, the component does not need to provide any state or method for its children components to share data among themselves. Everything is handled by Redux, which greatly simplifies the app and makes it easier to maintain. Redux is used to maintain and update data across your applications for multiple components to share, all while remaining independent of the components. When the button is clicked, it triggers the dispatch function with the specified action type, which will be handled by the reducer function to update the state accordingly. Hooks are functions that enable the execution of custom code in React’s functional components.
The most important thing here is that, unlike Redux, Context API is not a state management system. Instead, it’s a dependency injection mechanism where you manage a state in a React component. We get a state management system when using it with useContext and useReducer hooks. Each action contains a type (also seen as an identifier) and a payload.
Context API vs. ES6 import
If you still want it available as a prop, you need to explicitly return it yourself in your mapDispatchToProps implementation. It’s important to remember that whenever you update a nested value, you must also return new copies of anything above it in your state tree. If you have state.a.b.c.d, and you want to make an update to d, you would also need to return new copies of c, b, a, and state.
You won’t run into data inconsistency problems when accessing a single data source per view. Let’s define actions we want to dispatch to the reducer when the user clicks the increase or decrease button. Here, we’ll dispatch the actions that will make the reducer add 1 or
subtract 1 from the current counter value. In any application, the user interface will show existing state on screen. When a user
does something, the app will update its data and then redraw the UI with those values.
When not to choose Redux?
Since Redux doesn’t allow your application to make changes to the state and uses dispatch() to do that instead. Dispatch() just indicates an intent to change the state, it doesn’t actually change it… that’s where Reducers come in. Redux has strict guidelines about how code should be organized; this further ensures a predictable outcome which makes code easier to maintain. If we had left our components communicating with each other, we would have created an error prone and unreadable codebase. In order to update values immutably, your code must make copies of existing objects/arrays, and then modify the copies. So before you dive into the world of advanced state management (e.g. Redux), consider using the tools React ships with out of the box.
Because of this, it is recommended to use the Redux Toolkit while using Redux with React. 💡 A pure function is a function that will always return the same value if given the same parameters, i.e., the function depends on only the parameters and no external data. I’ve working on a complex project only with context, I didn’t see this point. Simply using getters and setters (it’s the same thing that use useState) in context do all the work. Integrates very well with hooks and custom hooks and also easy to read. Context API works best for small projects, where large amounts of debugging isn’t required.
What is the purpose of the “cluster” module in Node.js?
There can either be one reducer if it is a simple app or multiple reducers taking care of different parts or slices of the global state in a bigger application. The state of the whole application is stored in the form of a JS object tree in a single store as shown below. Given an initial state, with a specific list of actions in a specific order, it’ll always provide us with the exact same final state of the entity. With it, you can handle the initial render of the app by sending the state of an app to the server along with its response to the server request. The required components are then rendered in HTML and sent to the clients.
- We’ll take the cart component which displays the number of items in a user’s cart.
- On the other hand, with React Hooks and the useContext API, there is no need to install external libraries or add a bunch of files and folders to make our app work.
- Sure the argument that Redux isn’t a great fit for every application out there exists, and that’s true.
- Context API provides a different approach to tackling the data flow problem between React’s deeply nested components.
- That said, it is most useful when combined with a declarative view implementation that can infer the UI updates from the state changes, such as React or one of the similar libraries available.
With the considerable amount of code required to set up Redux, imagine what our codebase would look like when we have multiple components to work with. That’s where Redux saves the day for you; it eases the complexities that spring up in such applications. If you’ve got some experience in React, you’ll know that React’s data flow is such that parent components pass down props to child components. Context API provides a different approach to tackling the data flow problem between React’s deeply nested components. Context has been around with React for quite a while, but it has changed significantly since its inception. Up to version 16.3, it was a way to handle the state data outside the React component tree.
I found Redux to be easier to setup and work with than Context API. It made me appreciate Redux more and I switched back to save time. It was a good learning to know the specific use case and limitations of context.
You can think of dispatching actions as “triggering an event” in the application. Reducers act like event listeners, and when they hear an action they are interested in, they update the state in response. We can say that Redux reducers reduce a set of actions (over time) into a single state. The difference is that with Array.reduce() it happens all at once, and with Redux, it happens over the lifetime of your running app. Applications that consist of mostly simple UI changes most often don’t require a complicated pattern like Redux. Sometimes, old-fashioned state sharing between different components works as well and improves the maintainability of your code.
In our store.js file, we used the createContext() method from React to create a new context. Remember that the createContext() method returns an object what is redux with a Provider and Consumer component. This time, we’ll only use the Provider component and the useContext Hook when we need to access our state.
