react-redux-set-local

Local Redux state in React without writing your own reducers.

Like react-redux, we use a higher-order component to connect a presentational component with a specific portion of our Redux state. Unlike react-redux (and some other prior attempts to create "local" Redux state), rather than passing down a dispatch function, we pass down a setLocal function that we can use to replace existing state.

Why?

Redux's dispatch / action / reducer architecture makes it easy to reason about complex state management. Plus the dev tools and overall community support is fantastic.

However, Redux is overkill for state that's local to a specific component (e.g. is this dropdown open?). Redux's state management is, by design, independent of React's component architecture. Separating presentation logic from your state management code is great, but a standard React-Redux implementation (even using the helpful react-redux library) still requires a lot of glue code to hold everything together. Even simple state changes require all of the the following:

• An action to represent changes to the component state
• A reducer to apply the action to our store state
• Code to hook the reducer to the store
• The React component itself
• Container code hooking up the React component to code that dispatches our actions

The simplest alternative to this is to just use React's setState function. But this deprives us of Redux's dev tools and other benefits.

This is where react-redux-set-local comes in. This package provides a way to connect an isolated portion of a Redux store's state to your component while still maintaining separation between presentation and state management.

Installation

npm install react-redux-set-local --save or yarn add react-redux-set-local

Requires React and React-Redux as peer dependencies.

Basic Usage

Install react-redux-set-local

Use combineReducers to isolate a portion of your store for react-redux-set-local and hook up the reducer. By convention, we use the local property on our Redux state.

import { createStore, combineReducers } from "redux";
import { reducer } from "react-redux-set-local";

const store = createStore(combineReducers({
  local: reducer
}));

Then use the connect function to apply a function that takes

import { connect } from "react-redux-set-local";

// Presentation (component)
const DogShow = (props) => <div>
  <div>
    <span id="dogs">
      {props.dogs} {props.color} dog{props.dogs === 1 ? "" : "s"}
    </span>
    <button id="woof" onClick={props.onWoof}>
      Woof
    </button>
  </div>
</div>;

// State management code
const mapToProps = (localState, setLocal, ownProps) => {
  localState = localState || { dogs: 0 }; // localState can be undefined
  return {
    ...ownProps,
    ...locals,
    onWoof: () => setLocal({ dogs: locals.dogs + 1 })
  };
};

export const Container = connect(mapToProps)(DogShow);

By default, localState is specific to a specific component instance. It may be undefined (e.g. when the component first mounts).

The setLocal function simply replaces the existing state. Unlike React's setState, it does not merge changes or provide callbacks.

Like in react-redux, ownProps refers to the props passed to the container element.

Connect Factory

If you use something other than local with combineReducers for the reducer, you should invoke connectFactory insetad of connect.

import { createStore, combineReducers } from "redux";
import { reducer, connectFactory } from "react-redux-set-local";

const store = createStore(combineReducers({
  localState: reducer
}));

const connect = connectFactory("localState");

Explicit Keys

You can provide an explicit key string, or a function that returns key strings from props to synchronize state between components.

export const Container = connect(mapToProps, {
  key: (props) => props.color
})(DogShow);

...

let c1 = <Container color="blue" />; // Displays the same dog count as c2
let c2 = <Container color="blue" />; // Displays the same dog count as c1
let c3 = <Container color="red" />; // May display different dog count

By default, the local Redux state will clear when the container is unmounted, but you can persist the state with the persist option:

export const Container = connect(mapToProps, {
  key: (props) => props.color,
  persist: true
})(DogShow);

Customizing Action Types

By default, calling a setLocal function dispatches the SET_LOCAL action. You can customize the type used by passing a second, type string to the setLocal function:

setLocal({ dogs: locals.dogs + 1 }, "WOOF");

You can also specify default action types for a component when connecting:

export const Container = connect(mapToProps, {
  updateType: "WOOF", // Type for explicit calls to `setLocal`
  unmountType: "BARK" // Type for when this component unmounts
})(DogShow);

NB: RRSL's reducer doesn't care about types here. It instead looks to the presence of __setLocal and __payload properties on the action. Specifying a type here is solely for the purpose of debugging or to help RRSL play nice with other reducers or middleware.

Inspired by:

• https://github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal/
• https://github.com/threepointone/redux-react-local
• https://medium.com/@jeswin/implementing-redux-is-tedious-but-it-doesnt-have-to-be-33702a1fb1dd