redux-action-binder

A helper to easily and efficiently expose bound action creators.

Installation

npm install redux-action-binder

Usage

This was designed with "Ducks reducer bundles" in mind but regardless, it will bind all named functions located in a module. As an example, assuming a structure similar to this:

redux/
  reducer.js  // returns the combined reducer
  actions.js  // returns the bound actions (see below)
  modules/
    auth.js   // reducer modules exporting action constants, actions and module reducer
    login.js
    posts.js

// actions.js
import actionBinder from 'redux-action-binder';

// extract actions from all modules
import * as login from './login';
import * as auth from './auth';
import * as posts from './posts';

actionBinder.bindActions({ login, auth, posts });
const getBoundActions = actionBinder.getBoundActions;
export { getBoundActions };

In the PostsContainer class:

import { getBoundActions } from './redux/actions';

function mapStateToProps(state) {
  return {
    posts: state.posts
  };
}

function mapDispatchToProps(dispatch) {
  return getBoundActions(dispatch).posts();
}

// or to assign actions from multiple modules to the container...

import objectAssign from 'object-assign';

function mapDispatchToProps(dispatch) {
  return objectAssign({},
    getBoundActions(dispatch).login(),
    getBoundActions(dispatch).posts()
  );  
}

Note that getBoundActions returns an object who's properties are functions. Calling posts() the first time will invoke bindActionCreators on all post actions and subsequent calls will return the already bound actions. Actions are bound only once per each module.

IMPORTANT: By default, the current implementation imports all named functions found in the provided modules. In production builds this will not work if mangling is enabled. You must disable name mangling to use this, for example if using Webpack you can configure the Uglify plugin like this:

// Minify JS
new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin({
  mangle: false
})

If you have name mangling enabled you must mark all of the action creator functions using the static string "@action name;", for example:

export function loginSubmit() {
  "@action loginSubmit";
  return {type: LOGIN_SUBMIT, user, pass}
}

The name following the @action marker will be used as the property name of the function. This way, even if the function names are mangled this will still work:

  getBoundActions(dispatch).login().loginSubmit(user, pass)

To enable this feature you must configure the action binder prior to calling bindActions:

actionBinder.config({useAnnotations: true});

IMPORTANT NOTE: See warning about testing below.

What gets bound

If not using annotations the actionBinder currently imports all named functions from the modules provided. If the modules include other functions you can tell the actionBinder to ignore them by providing a second argument:

actionBinder.bindActions(...modules, ['func1', 'func2']);

In this case it will ignore functions func1 and func2.

Warning about running tests

If you are running tests with a beforeEach that resets the store, don't forget that the action binder caches the bound functions. For this specific use case, you will need to reset it and rebind the actions. For example, here is the redux/actions.js that exposes the bound methods as well as the reset function:

import actionBinder from 'redux-action-binder';
import * as login from './modules/login';
import * as auth from './modules/auth';
import * as posts   from './modules/posts';

actionBinder.bindActions({login, auth, posts});
const getBoundActions = actionBinder.getBoundActions;

const resetActionBinder = () => {
  actionBinder.reset();
  actionBinder.bindActions({login, auth, posts});
};

export { getBoundActions, resetActionBinder };

Call the resetActionBinder method each time you reconfigure the store for your tests or the actions will be executing against a different store instance.