reduxr-obj-actions

A utility to create auto-typed Redux actions from an object.

Part of the reduxr family of packages, pairs nicely with reduxr-obj-reducer.

Usage

One complaint about Redux is the amount of boilerplate in idiomatic codebases. This is partly due to the fact that action types are repeated in their const definitions, action helpers, and reducers.

Here's a simple example of the problem:

// Define a const for an action's type
const SET_NAME = 'SET_NAME';
const SET_AGE = 'SET_AGE';

// Define an action helper to create/dispatch the set name action
const actions = bindActionCreators({
  setName: name => ({ type: SET_NAME, name }),
  setAge: age => ({ type: SET_AGE, age })
}, dispatch);

obj-actions helps eliminate the redundancy:

const actions = objActions(dispatch, {
  setName: name => ({name}),
  setAge: age => ({age})
})

It may not look like a big savings, but it turns out to be very handy in many scenarios.

In the above code, a call to actions.setName('Frank') would result in the following action being dispatched: {type: 'setName', name: 'Frank'}.

You may have noticed that the dispatch function is passed as the first argument to objActions. This is because it is usually best to define your actions/action-helpers in several files, and just call objActions from your application main file:

// user-actions.js
export default {
  setName: name => ({name}),
  setAge: age => ({age})
}

// chat-actions.js
export default {
  addMessage: text => ({text}),
  flagMessage: id => ({id})
}

// main.js
import objActions from 'reduxr-obj-actions';
import user from './user-actions';
import chat from './chat-actions';

/// ... Redux initialization, and so on...

const actions = objActions(store.dispatch, {
  user,
  chat
})

In the example above, our action helpers are nested, and the generated action type is affected. Calling actions.user.setName('Joe') would produce the following action: {type: 'user_setName', name: 'Joe'}.

Explicitly declaring types

You use objActions as a way of avoiding the necessity of defining type. But sometimes you need to explicitly specify a type. ObjActions respects the type that your helper returns.

const actions = objActions(dispatch, {
  setName: name => ({type: 'SET_NAME', name}),
  setAge: age => ({age})
})

In the above situation, calling actions.setName('Sally') would produce this action: {type: 'SET_NAME', name: 'Sally'}.

Automatically passing actions down to containers

The most annoying thing about objActions is passing them down to each container. There is a hacky but effective way of avoiding this:

// In main.js
import actions from './actions'
import objActions from 'reduxr-obj-actions'

let store = createStore(todoApp)

// This is hacky, and is not necessary, but doing this
// prevents us from having to pass actions down through
// each container...
store.dispatch.actions = objActions(store.dispatch, actions);

Now, anywhere you can access dispatch you can access dispatch.actions.

An example of this can be seen here.

License MIT

Copyright (c) 2015 Chris Davies

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.