react-3ducks :duck: :hatched_chick: :hatching_chick:

A simple react global state management solution

• Installation
• Why
• Example
• API
• Contributing

Installation

npm install react-3ducks

Why

Redux is the current prevailing solution to manage global state in React apps. However, there are a few shortcomings to it that this project attempts to address. Some of them are as follows

• Encapsulation: Redux by convention has only one global store and it encapsulate only data. The behavior is fragmented between actions, action creators, reducers, epics, sagas, thunks etc. react-3ducks encourages and facilitates creation of multiple stores for various concerns in the application and also allows behavior encapsulation in the stores.
• Asynchronous Behavior: Redux has no built in way of handling asynchronous actions. react-3ducks fully supports asynchronous behavior through regular async/await or Promise based semantics that are already known and loved.
• Complexity: Its hard to quickly grasp what's going on in a Redux app. Mainly because of the fragmentation. There are many files and its not obvious what's going on where. react-3ducks addresses this by keeping all related logic and data together.
• Boilerplate: The amount of boilerplate code in Redux apps is just too much. react-3ducks allows for very terse declaration and definition of both state and behavior.

Example

This is a bare minimum example, Check out this for a (relatively) more elaborate one

//Imports

import React from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import StateStore, {root, container} from "react-3ducks";

//Store class

class CounterStore extends StateStore {
  
  // increment action

  increment = () => {
    this.setState({count: this.state.count + 1});
  }

  // decrement action

  decrement = () => {
    this.setState({count: this.state.count - 1});
  }
}

//Components

const Button = ({onClick, text}) => (
  <button onClick={onClick}>{text}</button>
)

const Label = ({text}) => (
  <span>{text}</span>
)

//Containers

const IncrementButton = container(Button, ({counterStore, props}) => ({
  onClick: counterStore.increment,
  text: "+"
}));

const DecrementButton = container(Button, ({counterStore}) => ({
  onClick: counterStore.decrement,
  text: "-"
}));

const CounterDisplay = container(Label, ({counterStore}) => ({
  text: counterStore.state.count
}));

//Store instance

const counterStore = new CounterStore({count: 0});

//Root

const App = root(() => (
  <div>
    <IncrementButton/>
    <CounterDisplay/>
    <DecrementButton/>
  </div>
), {counterStore})

//Render

ReactDOM.render(<App/>, document.getElementById("root"));

See this example in action

API

Time to introduce the three ducks (i.e. StateStore, root, and container) in react-3ducks

StateStore class

Encapsulates state and behavior. Should be extended to create separate specialized stores for e.g. CartStore, ProductsStore, AuthStore etc.

setState(newState) Method

setState works exactly as it does in React components. It expects a partial object with state changes and merges it into the existing state.

state Property

state also works exactly as it does in React components. Allows readonly access to the current state.

root(Component, {store1, store2, ...}) Higher Order Component

The root HOC accepts a Component and an object containing any stores that should be made available to the container components under Component

container(Component, mapToProps?) Higher Order Component

The container HOC passes stores as props to the Component. Alternatively, if its passed a second (optional) parameter i.e. mapToProps, it allows to map store state and behavior to props selectively.

mapToProps

This is a selector function that can be optionally passed as a second parameter to the container HOC to allow for selective mapping of store state and behavior to props passed to the wrapped Component. Its defined as

function(stores, ownProps)

In the first parameter its passed an object containing all the stores connected to the root component. The second parameter contains the props passed to the wrapper component created by the container HOC.

Its expected to return a plain object with prop names as keys, mapped to state or behavior

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. Just send a PR against the master branch or open a new issue. Thanks!