react-actions-defined

A library for adding definition for actions in redux

** PLEASE NOTE: This is an early, prerelease pacakge it is subject to (and will likely) change. **

This library leverages type-definitions for defining actions

Defining actions

To define a simple action that takes a payload of a string:

import { defineAction } from 'redux-actions-defined';

const { action, schema, creator } = defineAction('test-action', String);

More complex payloads

Similarly, you can define complex objects and arrays

import { defineAction } from 'redux-actions-defined';
import { types, optional } from 'type-definitions';

const { action, schema, creator } = defineAction('test-action', {
  id: optional(Number),
  value: {
    a: Number
    b: String,
    c: [String]
  },
  foo: types.Any.optional
});

this would accept payloads like:

{
  id: 1,
  value: {
    a: 1,
    b: 'test',
    c: ['test2', 'test3']
  }
}

but reject

{
  value: {
    a: 'not-a-nubmer',
    b: 'test',
    c: ['test2', 'test3']
  },
  foo: '!!!'
}

since value.a does not meet the Number condition

defineAction returns an object with three properties

• type - The string action name
• schema - The schema used to validate the payload
• creator - a creator function, it takes a payload argument and returns an object in the form of { type: type, payload: payload }, emitting an error to the console if the provided payload does not match the specified schema

Defining your own creator

Sometimes you want define a creator that, rather than just taking a constructed payload, takes arguments and constructs a payload for you. You can do this by calling the .newCreator function of the defineAction() creator.

const { type, creator } = defineAction('test-action', {
  id: Number,
  value: String
});

const randomValueCreator = creator.newCreator((id) => {
  id,
  value: Math.random()
})

the callback passed to newCreator should return a properly constructed payload, which will be validated in the same way calling the initially generated creator would have been. Consequently randomValueCreator defined above will error since value is not a string.

Redefinition protection

This module keeps track of defined actions so if you try and define an action with the same type key else where it will let you know!

Middleware

You can include the provided middleware which will error in the console when either an action that hasn't been defined, or one that is sent with an invalid payload is dispatched

Future optimization: Currently there is no way to define action types to ignore from the middleware. So actions used by plugins (which you wouldn't expect to define) will error

import reducer from './somewhere'
import { applyMiddleware, createStore } from 'redux';
import { reduxActionsDefinedMiddleware } from 'redux-actions-defined';

const store = createStore(
  reducer,
  applyMiddleware(reduxActionsDefinedMiddleware())
);

Reducer helper

Also included is a helper for constructing multi action reducers. It takes an has map in the form

import { createReducer } from 'redux-actions-defined';

createReducer({
  action_type: function (state, action) {
    // do something
    return state;
  }
})

it will route the action to the appropriate function based on type, returning the state, unmodified, if the action type does not match any of the functions in the provided hash

Prior art

This was very much based on https://github.com/modernserf/redux-action-schema since I didn't love the array-style schema definitions