The first output parameter of the hook is the actual component state. This state should be used in our application to represent the data. The new additions to the React library, useContext and useReducer, also came to manage the state of a React application. However, it has a subtle difference from Redux, which I’ll clarify further below. In general, try to find a balance between understandable data flow and areas of responsibility with your components.
Next, we have created a reducer called cartReducer which takes the state (with the default initial state) and the action as parameters. It switches on the action type, and then whichever case matches with the dispatched action type, it makes the necessary update and returns the fresh new version of the updated state. Redux guides you towards writing code that is predictable and testable, which helps give you confidence that your application will work as expected. When we use Redux for state management, we have to deal with prop drilling, meaning we have to write a lot of extra code just to get our application started. By using Context to nest components within components, all the functionality from the parent component is available in the child components.
Comparison of Context API and Redux
Whenever a user adds an item to the cart, the application has to internally handle that action by adding that item to the cart object. It has to maintain its state internally and also show the user the total number of items in the cart in the UI. We’ll take the cart component which displays the number of items in a user’s cart. The state of the cart component will consist of all the items the user has added to the cart and the total number of those items.
The ones familiar with react will know that react is a component-based front end library tool that connects the various segments of the web page. In react, we use props (short for properties) in a component which allows the usage of non-static variables. With the help of props, we can pass these variables into various other components (child components) from the parent component. This provider creates the theme object that will be used in all applications and one function to update it, the setTheme. It provides several tools to decrease the complexity of handling the global application state. With React’s Context API, you deal with a pair of components speaking only to each other.
Mobile App
React Hooks provide an alternative to writing class-based components by allowing us to easily handle state management from functional components. On the other hand, with React Hooks and the useContext API, there is no need to install external libraries or add a bunch of files and folders to make our app work. This makes it a much simpler, more straightforward approach to handling global state management in React applications. To some extent, Redux works well for state management in React applications and has a few advantages. However, its verbosity makes it difficult to learn, and the extra code needed to get it working can introduce unnecessary complexity. Redux and React Hooks should be seen as complements and also as different things.
It is widely used in React applications, but it can also be used with other libraries and frameworks. It was initially released in 2015 by Dan Abramov and Andrew Clark. React Hooks is the new way of handling state and life cycle into React components, without relying on component classes. It was introduced in the 16.8 version of the library and has the intention to decrease the complexity of the components, by sharing logic between them. The common recommended approach is to create memoized “selector” functions using Reselect. These selectors can be combined and composed together, and selectors later in a pipeline will only run if their inputs have changed.
Why should I use React-Redux?
Both of these already have Redux Toolkit and React-Redux configured appropriately for that build tool, and come with a small example app that demonstrates how to use several of Redux Toolkit’s features. The recommended way to start new apps with React and Redux is by using our official Redux+TS template for Vite, or by creating a new Next.js project using Next’s with-redux template. For example, there can be a reducer handling the state of the cart in a shopping application, then there can be a reducer handling the user details part of the application, and so on. There can either be one reducer if it is a simple app or multiple reducers taking care of different parts or slices of the global state in a bigger application. Instead, if anyone wants to change the state of the application, then they’ll need to express their intention of doing so by emitting or dispatching an action. And firing the action of adding one item to the cart again will increase the number of items in the cart to 2.
Provides APIs that enable your components to interact with the Redux store, so you don’t have to write that logic yourself. After getting to know the useContext function, there is one more that confuses the developers. In the section below, I will be walking through this functionality and explain its use case.
Create a React Redux App
Note that containers / smart components vs. dumb components is just a good way to structure your app. Javascript developer since 2016, I’ve built mobile apps using Ionic and React Native. If you are using Redux and React together, you should also use React-Redux to bind these two libraries. You’ll also need to install Redux and set up a Redux store in your app. If you are using Redux and React together, you should also use React Redux to bind these two libraries.
It shows as the main confusion with the Redux library, because developers tend to think that useReducer could replace the state manager library. This is mainly because the global use of useReducer demands rewrites of new code to features like the control of components update. This tutorial will introduce you to the core concepts, principles, and patterns for using Redux. By the time you finish, you should understand the different pieces that make up a Redux app, how data flows when using Redux, and our standard recommended patterns for building Redux apps.
Store
As the official binding library for React and Redux, React Redux has a large community of users. This makes it easier to ask for help, learn about best practices, use libraries that build on top of React Redux, and reuse your knowledge across different applications. Using Redux with ReactJS brings several advantages to your application development process.
That said, they both allow you to pass data without having to pass the props through multiple layers of components. Internally, Redux uses the React context API that allows it to pass the store along your component tree. React is generally fast, but by default any updates to a component will cause React to re-render all of the components inside that part of the component tree.
Now if the user wants to add another item to the cart, then they will have to click on the “Add to Cart” button next to the item. This helps you restrict any part of the view or any network calls to write/update the state directly. An e-commerce website will have several components like the cart component, user profile component, previously viewed section component, and so on. If we dig deeper into this statement, what is redux we see that Redux is a state management library that you can use with any JS library or framework like React, Angular, or Vue. Redux apps normally have a JS object as the root piece of the state, with other values inside that object. In this tutorial, we explored the differences between using Redux for state management in React apps and using the React Context API with the useContext and useReducer Hooks.
- If you are using Redux and React together, you should also use React Redux to bind these two libraries.
- After getting to know the useContext function, there is one more that confuses the developers.
- “Actions can be recorded and replayed later, so this makes state management predictable. With the same actions in the same order, you’re going to end up in the same state.”
- Accidentally mutating or modifying your state directly is by far the most common reason why components do not re-render after an action has been dispatched.