fluxx

More akin to Redux than Facebook flux, fluxx lets you manage your application state in a terse, centralized and scalable way.
It also has first-class support for typescript.

Content

• Store
• Manually redrawing the view on store change
• Async actions
• React Connector
• Full example
• Typescript store

Store

There are two kinds of Stores.

GlobalStore

GlobalStores hold global state, are always active and can be depended upon by many views.

import { GlobalStore, Action } from 'fluxx'
import otherStore from './otherStore'

// The action names (passed in the Action factory) can be anything,
// they're just here to help during debug (Store.log = true or store.log = true)
const increment = Action('increment')
const decrement = Action('decrement')

const store = GlobalStore({
  // The initial state
  state: 0,

  // Action handlers transforming the state
  handlers: {
    [action.increment]: (state, by) => state + by,
    [action.decrement]: (state, by) => state - by
  }
});

store.subscribe(newState => console.log(newState))

action.increment(30)
action.decrement(5)

console.log(store.state === 25)

LocalStore

LocalStores are transient stores that should be created when its view needs it and destroyed when that view is no longer displayed.
They have the same API as GlobalStores, and an additional onDispose callback, which is called when the last unsubscribe function (returned from a subscribe call) is invoked.

Important note: Inside stores, Received actions are matched by reference, so it is best to only use LocalStores for singleton views, and not reusable components.
Otherwise, one action dispatched by one of the views would be received by all the currently active LocalStore instances of the same kind.

Preventing the store from dispatching the change event

Simply return the same state reference in the update handler and the store won't dispatch this event.

Manually redrawing the view on store change

import { store, action } from './valueStore'

// Render again whenever the store changes
const unsubscribe = store.subscribe(render)

function render() {
  console.log('render!')
  // Actually render a component using React, virtual-dom, etc
}

// Trigger the increment action: Increment store's value by 33
action.increment(33)

Async actions

Fluxx don't have these as they are not necessary.
As an example, here's a suggestion of how one could structure her code performing ajax calls:

/* saveTodo.js */

import { savingTodo, todoSaved, todoSaveFailed } from './actions';

export default function(todo) {
  // Tell the store we're about to attempt persisting a new todo on the server.
  // Could be used to optimistically add the todo on screen and/or show a progress indicator
  savingTodo(todo)

  fetch('/todos', { method: 'post', body: todo })
    // Tell the store the todo was successfully saved: Remove the progress indicator
    .then(res => todoSaved(todo))
    // Tell the store there was an error while saving the todo, mark the todo as local only, display errors, offer retry, etc.
    .catch(err => todoSaveFailed(todo))
}

React connector

To use both React and fluxx, a connector add-on is provided to connect any component to the store.

The connected component will only re-render when the store's datum of interest actually changed. This means you can not just mutate the store's state, its reference should change if it was actually updated. This is consistent with the various React practices needed to get good performances.

If you wish to use basic Objects and Arrays as your store's state, you may want to check immupdate.

Which components should be connected to the store? The answer is 'some of them'.

Too few connected components and you will have to write a lot of boilerplate to manually pass down props instead. Furthermore, you will suffer mild performance penalties as parents will 'update' simply because they need to pass some data to their children as props.

Too many connected components and the data flow becomes a bit harder to follow.

As a rule of thumb, connect at least the smart components managing a particular routing hierarchy, plus any heavily nested smart component that needs some data its parents don't.

import connect from 'fluxx/lib/ReactConnector'

// Your store instance; also import an Action
import store, { incrementBy } from './store'


class Blue extends React.Component {
  render() {
    const { count } = this.props

    return (
      <p onClick={ incrementBy10 }>{ count }</p>
    )
  }
}

function incrementBy10() { incrementBy(10) }

// Takes a component, the store instance and a function returning the slice of data we're interested in.
export default connect(Blue, store, state => (
  { count: state.blue.count }
))

connect can work with either GlobalStore or LocalStore instances. A LocalStore should be wrapped inside a function so that the wrapping component can create a new Store instance everytime the component is mounted. That function is passed the view's initial props as its only argument.

Enabling logging

This will log all action dispatching along with the updated state of the store afterwards.

import { Store } from 'fluxx'
Store.log = true

Full example

Coming soon...

Typescript store

fluxx has first class support for typescript. This means EVERYTHING will be type-safe!
However, to achieve that, a few changes are required compared to using fluxx with plain javascript:

Action declaration

import { Action } from 'fluxx'

// Declare an action that takes no argument
export const increment = Action('increment')

// Declare an action that takes an argument of type number.
// It could of course be any custom type as well.
export const incrementBy = Action<number>('incrementBy')

Store creation

import { GlobalStore } from 'fluxx'
import update from 'immupdate'

interface State {
  count: number,
  somethingElse: string
}

const initialState = { count: 0, somethingElse: '' }

// Create the actual store instance
GlobalStore(initialState, on => {
  on(action.incrementBy, (state, by) => update(state, { count: c => c + by }))
})

Connecting a React component to the store

import connect from 'fluxx/lib/ReactConnector'

// Your store instance; also import an Action
import store, { incrementBy } from './store'

// Declare the props our parent should give us
interface ParentProps {
  params: { id: string },
  children: React.ReactElement<any>
}

// Declare our "own" props,
// that is the store's slice of state that get injected to our props by connect.
interface StoreProps {
  count: number
}

// Our final props is the combination of the two prop sources.
// Of course, it is not strictly required to split props in two interfaces.
type Props = ParentProps & StoreProps;

class Blue extends React.Component<Props, void> {
  render() {
    // Type safe deconstruction
    const { count, params: { id } } = this.props

    return (
      <p onClick={ incrementBy10 }>{ count }</p>
    )
  }
}

// Action dispatching is also type-safe: we could not pass anything other than a number here.
function incrementBy10() { incrementBy(10) }


export default connect(Blue, store, (state): StoreProps => (
  { count: state.count }
))

Running the tests

npm run test