I'm using Redux to write a NodeJS app. I'm interested in allowing users to dynamically load middleware by specifying it at runtime.
How do I dynamically update the middleware of a running Redux application to add or remove middleware?
Middleware is not some separate extension, it's part of what your store is. Swapping it at runtime could lead to inconsistencies. How do you reason about your actions if you don't know what middleware they'll be run through? (Keep in mind that middlewares don't have to operate synchronously.)
You could try a naive implementation like the following:
const middlewares = [];
const middlewareMiddleware = store => next => act => {
const nextMiddleware = remaining => action => remaining.length
? remaining[0](store)(nextMiddleware(remaining.slice(1)))(action)
: next(action);
nextMiddleware(middlewares)(act);
};
// ... now add/remove middlewares to/from the array at runtime as you wish
but take note of the middleware contract, particularly the next argument. Each middleware receives a "pass to the next middleware" function as part of its construction. Even if you apply middlewares dynamically, you still need to tell them how to pass their result to the next middleware in line. Now you're faced with a loss-loss choice:
action will go through all of the middleware registered at the time it was dispatched (as shown above), even if it was removed or other middleware was added in the meantime, or
each time the action is passed on, it goes to the next currently registered middleware (implementation is a trivial excercise), so it's possible for an action to go through a combination of middlewares that were never registered together at a single point in time.
It might be a good idea to avoid these problems alltogether by sticking to static middleware.
Use redux-dynamic-middlewares
https://github.com/pofigizm/redux-dynamic-middlewares
Attempting to change middleware on-the-fly would violate the principle of 'pure' actions and reducer functions, because it introduces side-effects. The resulting app will be difficult to unit-test.
Off the top of my head, it might be possible to create multiple stores (one for each possible middleware configuration), and use a parent store to provide the state switch between them. You'd move the data between the sub-stores when switching. Caveat: I've not seen this done, and there might be good reasons for not doing it.
Related
Hello this is my first question. I am trying to set up a project where modules along with the redux and sagas will be injected into the main app, using redux-injectors. In my sagas I want to use yield select, to check if an action has updated the state and then carry on. For example, when I post an image, I want to make sure there were no errors in posting the file and then move on. I use the following function:
export const imageErrors = (state: RootState): IImagesErrorState => state.image.errors
and then in the saga.ts file I use it as such:
if (imagesErrors?.postImageError !== null) {
throw imagesErrors.postImageError
}
this works fine as long as the state.image exists in the root state from the beginning. However, how do I do that when I want to inject this state later on using useInjectReducer and useInjectSaga? I obviously get an error
Property 'image' does not exist on type 'Reducer<CombinedState<{ user: CombinedState<{ auth: IAuthState; errors: IErrorState; }>; }>, AnyAction>'.ts(2339)
So how do we handle selectors of specific pieces of state, since state does not yet include them?
Thank you so much.
Can't talk about the Typescript part of things, but in terms of architecture you've got two options.
One is the obvious - that is to add conditions or ? everywhere to avoid errors from accessing missing properties, but that can get tedious quickly.
The other probably better option is to rethink your state & application chunks. What is this saga that is accessing state that isn't existing yet? Does it need to run before you have such state? If not, let's move the saga to the same chunk as the reducer. In the opposite case, where you need the saga to be running e.g. as part of the runtime chunk, then perhaps the image state should be in the runtime chunk as well.
I'm currently exploring the new Redux Toolkit setup. However, I stumbled upon CreateAsyncThunk when fetching data, but I cannot find pros and cons using this over a normal service class using e.g. axios.
Can someone explain to me why I should/shouldn't use the CreateAsyncThunk to fetch data from an api?
Redux is the place where you store your data.
So after your request you need to dispatch an action, to get your data into Redux.
Now, often your components are also interested in the question if you already are running a request.
That information could be stored in your component, but then other components won't know. So you store it in Redux, too.
Now you need to also dispatch an action to signal Redux that you started loading data.
The same goes for errors. You need to dispatch an action to signal Redux that loading failed.
createAsyncThunk takes code from you and executes that. But before, it dispatches an action. And depending if your code was a succcess or had an exception, it also dispatches either a "fulfilled" or "rejected" action for you.
So you only have to concentrate on the code you want to write.
So nothing stops you from doing
const myThunk = createAsyncThunk('myThunk', myApiService.getSomeData)
in the end - which would be using your api service, coupled with createAsyncThunk for the lifecycle actions - assuming your api service only takes one argument, otherwise it'd be
const myThunk = createAsyncThunk('myThunk', ({name, password}) => myApiService.getSomeData(name, password))
since cAT only forwards one argument from the action creator call.
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 am kind of confused about which methods belong with and when to use them.
Right now, I am using subscribe for basically everything and it is not working for me when I want a quick static value out of Firebase. Can you explain when I should use subscribe vs other methods other than for a strict observable?
When working with async values you have a few options: promises, rxjs, callbacks. Every option has its own drawbacks.
When you want to retrieve a single async value it is tempting to use promises for their simplicity (.then(myVal => {})). But this does not give you access to things like timeouts/throttling/retry behaviour etc. Rx streams, even for single values do give you these options.
So my recommendation would be, even if you want to have a single value, to use Observables. There is no async option for 'a quick static value out of a remote database'.
If you do not want to use the .subscribe() method there are other options which let you activate your subscription like .toPromise() which might be easier for retrieving a single value using Rx.
const getMyObjPromise = $firebase.get(myObjId)
.timeout(5000)
.retry(3)
.toPromise()
getMyObjPromise.then(obj => console.log('got my object'));
My guess is, that you have a subscribe method that contains a bunch of logic like it was a ’.then’ and you save the result to some local variable.
First: try to avoid any logic inside the subscription-method -> use stream-operators before that and then subscribe just to retrieve the data.
You much more flexible with that and it is much easier to unit-test those single parts of your stream than to test a whole component in itself.
Second: try to avoid using a manual subscriptions at all - in angular controllers they are prone to cause memory leaks if not unsubscribed.
Use the async-pipe instead in your template and let angular manage the subscription itself.