I have an angular component that contains a NgModal popup.
I am subscribing to the ngrx store in the component.
The component's ngOnDestroy is never called because a new route is never called.
The user add's new Users via the modal popup.
The subscription(select) to the store for the 'user' state never unsubscribes and is being called many times.
What is the best way to handle the unsubscribing from a store.select() when ngOnDestroy() is never called?
The easiest way around this issue is don't subscribe in your component, do it in the template through the async pipe.
From the Angular Docs:
The async pipe subscribes to an Observable or Promise and returns the latest value it has emitted. When a new value is emitted, the async pipe marks the component to be checked for changes. When the component gets destroyed, the async pipe unsubscribes automatically to avoid potential memory leaks (emphasis added).
Since you mentioned ngOnDestroy is not called, then most likely the component persists and is hidden/shown as needed, in which case you'll just get the single subscribe.
You can also prevent multiple subscribe calls in the template by using the "async as" pattern, as explained by Todd Motto here.. Basically, when encountering the need for multiple async pipes in a template, use *ngIf="data$ | async as data" at a higher element and reference the resolved data below.
Destroying the Subscription inside ngOnDestroy() is useful, if you don't want that subscription to be called in different components
However, if the subscription is getting called multiple time within the same component you can solve this by using RxJs Operators
yourSelectorname$.pipe(skip(1)).pipe(take(1)).subscribe
or
yourSelectorname$.pipe(take(1)).subscribe
It depends according to your need
Related
I have what I believe is a very common scenario... I'm building a dashboard of components that will be driven by some datasource. At the top of the view would be a series of filters (e.g. a date range). When the date range is updated, the components on the screen would need to update their data based on the selected range. This would in turn force the individual components that are slave to that picker to need to fetch new data (async action/XHR) based on the newly selected range.
There can be many components on the screen and the user may wish to add/remove available displays, so it is not as simple as always refreshing the data for all components because they may or may not be present.
One way I thought to handle this was in the action dispatched when a new date range is selected was to figure out what components are on screen (derived from the Store) and dispatch async actions to fetch the data for those components. This seems like a lot of work will go into the DATE_CHANGED action.
Another alternative might be to detect date range changes in store.subscribe() callbacks from each of the components. This seems to decouple the logic to fetch the data from the action that caused this to happen. However, I thought it was bad practice (or even an error) to dispatch while dispatching. Sure I can wrap it in a setTimeout, but that feels wrong too.
Third thing that came to mind was just doing fetch calls directly in the component's store.subscribe() and dispatching when those return, but I thought this breaks the connect model.
This seems like a common pattern to fetch based on state changes, but I don't know where its best to put those. Any good documentation / examples on the above problem?
Don't use store.subscribe for this. When DATE_CHANGED reaches the reducer it's meant for, simply change the application state (I'm assuming the date range is part of the store somehow). So you have something like state.rangeStart and state.rangeEnd.
You didn't mention what view rendering library you're using, so I can only describe how this is typically done with React:
The components know wether they are currently mounted (visible) or not, so redux doesn't need to be concerned with that. What you need is a way to detect that state.rangeStart or state.rangeEnd changed.
In React there is a lifecycle hook for that (componentWillReceiveProps or getDerivedStateFromProps in the newest release). In this handler you dispatch async redux actions that fetch the data the component needs. Your view library will probably have something similar.
The components display some kind of "empty" or "loading" state while you're waiting for the new data typically. So a good practice is to invalidate/clear data from the store in the reducer that handles the DATE_CHANGED action. For example, if state.listOfThings (an array) entirely depends on the date range, you would set it to an empty array as soon as the date changes: return { ...state, listOfThings: [] }. This causes the components to display that data is being fetched again.
When all the async redux actions went through the REQUEST -> SUCCESS/FAILURE cycle and have populated the store with the data, connected components will automatically render it. This is kind of its own chapter, look into redux async actions if you need more information.
The tricky part are interdependencies between the components and the application they're rendering. If two different dashboard components for example want to fetch and render state.listOfThings for the current date range, you don't want to fetch this data twice. So there needs to be a way to detected that 1) the data range has changed but also 2) a request to fetch listOfThings is already on its way. This is usually done with boolean flags in the state: state.isFetchingListOfThings. The async actions fetching this data cause the reducer to set this flag to true. Your components need to be aware of this and dispatch actions conditionally: if (props.rangeStart !== nextProps.rangeStart && !nextProps.isFetchingListOfThings) { props.fetchListOfThings(); }.
Let's say my Redux global state looks as follows:
{
micEnabled : Boolean,
filterEnabled : Boolean
}
A React component has a "Enable Mic" button that, upon clicked, should perform an async operation (that may take a while) and resolves with a Promise. In order to run such an async operation I can add a custom Redux middleware into the store, or can use redux-thunk, etc. That's not the question.
Here my question: Which one should be the name of the Redux action invoked on "Enable Mic" click?
When there is no async stuff involved it's common to name Redux actions as "setters" (SET_CURRENT_TIME) or expressive actions (TOGGLE_FILTER) that will be directly used by reducers to update state. So one may suggest ENABLE_MIC for my use case above, but the fact is that such an action (let's say "action 1") should not directly update state.micEnabled.
Instead, my Redux middleware will intercept action 1 (ENABLE_MIC), run the async operation and, once resolved, dispatch yet another Redux action ("action 2") so the corresponding reducer would update state.micEnabled. So "action 2" could be MIC_ENABLED.
To summarize:
Click on button dispatches ENABLE_MIC.
Redux middleware intercepts it and performs async operation.
On resolved, middleware dispatches MIC_ENABLED.
Reducer updates state.micEnabled.
Ok, this makes lot of sense. The problem is that, within my actions, I also have tons of "common actions" that are dispatched to reducers to update state (such as TOGGLE_FILTER):
Click on checkbox dispatches TOGGLE_FILTER.
Reducer updates state.filterEnabled.
So both ENABLE_MIC and TOGGLE_FILTER represent "commands" or "requests", but just one of them (TOGGLE_FILTER) is used by reducers to update state. In the other side, the reducer also listens for MIC_ENABLED action (which is not a "command" or "request" but something that has happened or an event).
So, is there any recommendation for naming these kinds of Redux actions in a comprehensible so, by looking at the name of all my Redux actions, I can easily know which ones update state and which ones just dispatch another actions?
Treat it like an AJAX request and call them ENABLE_MIC_REQUEST which can result in ENABLE_MIC_SUCCESS or ENABLE_MIC_FAILURE (if this is possible in your scenario). You could cover everything in one action creator, using thunk, named something like enableMic. That should be fairly transparent.
Only ENABLE_MIC_SUCCESS would then flip micEnabled in the reducer. I'd recommend to rename that to isMicEnabled btw to make it super clear that it's a boolean flag.
When handling ENABLE_MIC_FAILURE you can show error messages, or do whatever is appropriate in your app.
The store has a method called getState that will return the current state of the store.
What prevents code somewhere in my application from (accidentally) modifying the returned state from store?
Let's say i call this:
let state = store.getState();
state.someProperty = 'fun';
The implementation that i've found on getState on the store object simply returns the inner state object that gets overwritten with each new action.
const getState = () => state;
In between actions/new states what prevents code from modifying the state that will be read by another subscriber? In my above example, setting someProperty to 'fun' will persist inside the store on the state property, until overwritten.
While i'm obviously not supposed to modify the state, a simple mistake might bind the state to some component that (unknowingly) modifies its inputs - perhaps on a 2-way binding in an angular environment?
<app-some-component [user]="state"></app-some-component>
Shouldn't getState() be implemented as a clone of its state model?
P.S. This is not specifically related to Angular - which is why i didn't add the tag - to allow more people not used to Angular to answer the question.
The answer is: nothing :)
The core Redux library itself technically doesn't actually care if state gets mutated or not. You could actually mutate in your reducers, or have other parts of your app get the state tree and mutate it, and the store itself wouldn't know or care.
However, mutation will break time-travel debugging, as well as make tests unreliable. Even more importantly, the React-Redux library assumes that you will handle your state immutably, and relies on shallow equality comparisons to see if the state has changed. (This is the reason why "Why isn't my component re-rendering?" is in the Redux FAQ. 99.9% of the time, it's due to accidental mutation.)
If you are concerned about mutation, you can use a library like Immutable.js instead of plain JS objects, or use one of the several tools for freezing your state in development to catch mutations.
I would like many different redux actions in my app to all trigger common functionality in a specific reducer. I would like to avoid having to either repeat some flag in every action creator (like doThing: true) that the reducer looks for. I also don't want to have to have the reducer just look for every individual action that falls into this category, since that also requires someone to remember to do this every time they add a new action, like adding the flag.
I was thinking of dispatching a second action every time one of these actions is going to be dispatched. This would not be hard to do, but I'd rather not have 2 actions dispatched every time one thing happens. It seems like it would pollute the state history.
Is there a common way of solving this problem?
For more context to my specific problem, the specific feature is related to the API client my app uses to talk to our API. On every successful response, we'd like to do something in a reducer to update the state, and on every failed response, we'd like to do something else.
There are many different success and failure actions (such as ITEM_FETCH_SUCCESS or WIDGET_UPDATE_FAILURE), and adding a flag to all of them would be hard to remember to do when new ones are added.
Since all api requests go through a single function, that function COULD dispatch generic REQUEST_SUCCESS and REQUEST_FAILURE actions. But this would mean every response from the server would dispatch 2 actions (REQUEST_SUCCESS and ITEM_FETCH_SUCCESS). This is obviously not ideal since it would mean many more actions in my state history.
Assuming the generic REQUEST_SUCCESS and REQUEST_FAILURE actions are updating their own specific portions of the state-tree then it is fine to dispatch them as distinct actions. Doing this does not necessarily imply the pollution of your state history but can simply be a better description of the app's intentions.
ITEM_FETCH_SUCCESS: Change state for item
REQUEST_SUCCESS: Change state for request
WIDGET_UPDATE_FAILURE: Change state for widget
REQUEST_FAILURE: Change state for request
You can see that whilst the actions are intimately related, they are not necessarily the same thing as they change different parts of the state tree.
Accepting this, the question is: How best to implement the action-pairs so that adding new actions does not mean remembering to add its corresponding REQUEST_* partner?
I would consider applying a simple redux middleware component. This could intercept the return from your api and dispatch the appropriate REQUEST_* action automatically.
Here is an example from some live code. This middleware intercepts a disconnect event raised by a websocket and automatically dispatches a custom action as a result. It at least shows the principle:
//Dispatch a disconnect action when the websocket disconnects
//This is the custom action provided by the middleware
import io from 'socket.io-client'
import { actions } from './action'
const websocket = ({ websocketUrl }) => store => {
const socket = io(websocketUrl)
socket.on('disconnect', () => store.dispatch(actions.disconnect()))
}
export default websocket
//Apply the custom middleware via the redux createStore function
//Also include the thunk middleware because it is useful
import { applyMiddleware } from 'redux'
import thunk from 'redux-thunk'
import websocket from './middleware'
function websocketize (opts) {
return createStore => (reducers, initial, enhancer) => {
const middleware = applyMiddleware(thunk, websocket(opts))
return createStore(reducers, initial, middleware)
}
}
export default websocketize
// Create the top-level redux store passing in the custom middleware enhancer
const opts = {websocketUrl: env.WEBSOCKET_URL}
const store = createStore(reducers, websocketize(opts))
This implementation keeps everything inside your reducers as opposed to having logic outside in an interception(middleware). Both ways are valid.
Try a sub-reducer pattern. I usually feel gross when I see it used(because it is usually used wrong), but your situation sounds perfect.
Extract duplicate functionality out of your reducers to one single
sub-reducer.
Then pass that reducer as a function to all others that need it.
Then pass the action and state onto the sub-reducer.
The sub-reducer does it's thing and returns that slice of state to
your parent reducer to allow you to do whatever you want with it
there (ie return it, mutate some more, some logic).
Also if you are tired of worrying about typing out "all the stuff" for async then I highly recommend you try out redux-crud.js
It also is possible and a simple way to do that would be to give every action to one reducer and let it do that common mutation, in a single case:
case actionOne
actionTwo
actionThree
actionFour: {
//do common stuff here
}
. But you said it is not duplicated, it is similar, which means your case becomes complicated by branching logic. I also don't recommend this. Keep cases simple so you can easily catch invalid mutations. This should be a super power of redux that it is easy to catch mutation errors. And for this reason and many others I don't recommend normalizing data in the front end.
I have a template in which a user should be able to click on a button to bring up a modal and in the modal choose a handful of items out of a list of about 10,000 items which are displayed there to search or scroll through.
Since this collection is so big, I don't want to keep it around in memory when I don't absolutely need it.
So I would like to subscribe to this collection only when the modal is being viewed and I would like to ensure that I am unsubscribed if the modal is not being viewed.
Is there a way to explicitly unsubscribe from a collection?
There are a couple of ways you can do this:
Use the subscription handle
subscribe returns a handle you can call stop on. For example:
var handle = Meteor.subscribe('stuff');
handle.stop();
Use an autorun
Because an autorun will automatically start and stop subscriptions when its reactive dependencies change, this will work:
Tracker.autorun(function () {
if (Session.get('showingModal'))
Meteor.subscribe('stuff');
});
Side note - it may make more sense to use a method call for searching such a large data set rather than publishing the entire thing to the client. For example you can set a session variable whenever the user's query changes, then use an autorun to update the result set based on the method's return value.
https://docs.meteor.com/#/full/meteor_subscribe
Quoting the docs :
Meteor.subscribe returns a subscription handle, which is an object
with the following methods:
stop() Cancel the subscription. This will typically result in the
server directing the client to remove the subscription's data from the
client's cache.
So basically what you need to do is storing the subscription handle in a variable and call the stop method when you don't need those published documents anymore.
Note that if you're using iron:router (and you probably should), this is taken care of automatically for you on each route change, which is convenient but has the side effect of provoking a lot of sometimes unnecessary calls to Meteor.publish calls which are non trivial for the server and bandwidth... to address this matter you can use meteorhacks:subs-manager but it's another topic anyway.