THIS IS A WIP. DONT USE IT YET

saga

saga is a library that aims to make side effects (i.e. asynchronous things like data fetching and impure things like accessing the browser cache) easier and better.

The mental model is that a saga is like a separate thread in your application that's solely responsible for side effects.

It uses an ES6 feature called Generators to make those asynchronous flows easy to read, write and test. (if you're not familiar with them here are some introductory links) By doing so, these asynchronous flows look like your standard synchronous JavaScript code. (kind of like async/await, but generators have a few more awesome features we need)

Getting started

Install

$ npm install --save saga-js

Alternatively, you may use the provided UMD builds directly in the <script> tag of an HTML page. See this section.

Usage Example

Suppose we have an UI to fetch some user data from a remote server when a button is clicked. (For brevity, we'll just show the action triggering code.)

class UserComponent extends React.Component {
  ...
  onSomeButtonClicked() {
    const { userId, dispatch } = this.props
    dispatch({type: 'USER_FETCH_REQUESTED', payload: {userId}})
  }
  ...
}

The Component dispatches a plain Object action to the Store. We'll create a Saga that watches for all USER_FETCH_REQUESTED actions and triggers an API call to fetch the user data.

sagas.js

import { takeEvery, takeLatest } from 'saga'
import { call, put } from 'saga/effects'
import Api from '...'

// worker Saga: will be fired on USER_FETCH_REQUESTED actions
function* fetchUser(action) {
   try {
      const user = yield call(Api.fetchUser, action.payload.userId);
      yield put({type: "USER_FETCH_SUCCEEDED", user: user});
   } catch (e) {
      yield put({type: "USER_FETCH_FAILED", message: e.message});
   }
}

/*
  Starts fetchUser on each dispatched `USER_FETCH_REQUESTED` action.
  Allows concurrent fetches of user.
*/
function* mySaga() {
  yield* takeEvery("USER_FETCH_REQUESTED", fetchUser);
}

/*
  Alternatively you may use takeLatest.

  Does not allow concurrent fetches of user. If "USER_FETCH_REQUESTED" gets
  dispatched while a fetch is already pending, that pending fetch is cancelled
  and only the latest one will be run.
*/
function* mySaga() {
  yield* takeLatest("USER_FETCH_REQUESTED", fetchUser);
}

export default mySaga;

Documentation

• Introduction
• Basic Concepts
• Advanced Concepts
• Recipes
• External Resources
• Troubleshooting
• Glossary
• API Reference

Using umd build in the browser

There is also a umd build of saga available in the dist/ folder. When using the umd build saga is available as Saga in the window object.

The umd version is useful if you don't use Webpack or Browserify. You can access it directly from unpkg.

The following builds are available:

• https://unpkg.com/redux-saga/dist/redux-saga.js
• https://unpkg.com/redux-saga/dist/redux-saga.min.js

Important! If the browser you are targeting doesn't support ES2015 generators, you must provide a valid polyfill, such as the one provided by babel. The polyfill must be imported before saga: