Overview of Redux

Redux

Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. As the application grows, it becomes difficult to keep it organized and maintain data flow. Redux solves this problem by managing the application’s state with a single global object called Store. Redux fundamental principles help in maintaining consistency throughout your application, which makes debugging and testing easier.

More importantly, it gives you live code editing combined with a time-traveling debugger. It is flexible to go with any view layer such as React, Angular, Vue, etc.

Why should we use Redux?

A JS library – React, helps to divide the apps into various components but is unable to give input about the data, state, and how to deal with all the other events. React doesn’t deal with how to manage the state objects, ensuring the only way to fix it is through Redux. The react application data is flowing from the parent component to the child component. One can send the data from parent components to child components in the form of props. There are too many components to React, which makes it difficult to track the flow of the data from parent to child components. As such, we use Redux as it can manage all the states of the components.

It also ensures a greater developer experience. With redux, it is possible to isolate a store having a state, so all components can get associated with it to gain the required state object from it.

When should we use it?

Below are some of the reasons when we should consider

1. Caching page states – When the user is surfing through a page, and then when he goes to another page and comes back, the expectation is to have the page in the same state. As reducers initialize and live throughout the session, they can preserve the state of the page.
2. State management of the component – Redux is used when we have to manage the state of the components.
3. Global components are easily accessible – They have application life enabling snack bars, notifications, tooltips, etc. It is of utmost significance when it comes to creating actions for dispatching commands. As an example – If a code generates an asynchronous request, it will produce a snack bar action when the request fails concerning the backend. In a situation where a user is not using Redux, it requires another event system, or else it needs to instantiate the snack bar component whenever it has been in use.
4. If there are numerous props associated with a high-end component from which only a few of them are utilized, then they can be considered to refactor with Redux.
5. This mostly takes place in wrapper components, which do not require a lot of data or configuration. As such, it is essential to side-chain Redux into a lower-level component in such cases.
6. The Same piece of application state needs to be mapped to multiple container components. It provides a convenient and best way to share state.

Advantages of Redux

• Central store- With the help of redux, any component can access any state from the store. It also preserves the state of the component event after the component is unmounted.
• When the state changes, it returns a new state and prevents unnecessary re-renders.
• It will benefit in a testing will as it separates UI and data management is separated.
• The history of the state is maintained, which helps in implementing features like undo.
• Redux makes it easy to debug an application. With the help of redux, it is easy to understand network errors, coding errors, and other forms of bugs.
• Its organized codes enable the professionals to grab a thorough understanding of the structure of various Redux applications. This, in turn, makes it an easy-to-use open-source JavaScript library.

When not choosing Redux

Applications that consist of mostly simple User Interface changes most often do not require a complicated pattern like Redux. Sometimes, old-fashioned state sharing between different components works as well and improves the maintainability of your code.

Also, the users can avoid using Redux if their data comes from a single data source per view. In other words, if we do not require data from multiple sources, there is no need to introduce Redux. We won’t run into data inconsistency problems when accessing a single data source per view.

Therefore, make sure to check if we need Redux before introducing its complexity. Although it’s a reasonably efficient pattern that promotes pure functions, it might be an overhead for simple applications that involve only a couple of UI changes. On top of that, we should not forget that Redux is an in-memory state store. In other words, if our application crashes, we lose our entire application state. This means that we have to use a caching solution to create a backup of our application state, which again creates extra overhead.

Conclusion

• We have discussed the major features of Redux and why Redux is beneficial to our application.
• While Redux has its benefits, that does not mean we should go about adding Redux to all of our apps. Our application might still work well without Redux.
• One major benefit of Redux is to add direction to decouple “what happened” from “how things change.”
• We should only implement Redux if we determine our project needs a state management tool.