Since it’s possible (though perhaps shouldn’t be your first choice) to share state with useContext – I’ll give hooks a 4/5 stars for sharing state. Here, the Navbar what is redux for component holds a piece of state called username. Notice I use ReturnType helper to extract return type from useAppReducer and use them to type contexts’ values.
For useReducer, you’ll be handling a state object that contains multiple values with different data types in a tree-like structure. You’ll need to declare functions that can change one or more of these state values. For data types such as arrays, you’ll need to declare multiple immutable functions for handling add, update and delete actions. You’ll see an example of this in a later section of this tutorial.
If you’re reading this, you probably understand how the promise and async/await are different in the execution context.
This article wasn’t meant to bring Redux down, but rather show the power React provides even before reaching to additional packages and libraries. Context is how state (that exists somewhere already) is shared with other components. Because of this, React-Redux can also be used to avoid prop-drilling, specifically because React-Redux uses Context internally. Instead of explicitly putting a new value into a yourself, you can put that data into the Redux store and then access it anywhere.
We recommend to pass dispatch down in context rather than individual callbacks in props. The approach below is only mentioned here for completeness and as an escape hatch. The empty set of dependencies, [], means that the effect will only run once when the component mounts, and not on every re-render. The problem is that inside the setInterval callback, the value of count does not change, because we’ve created a closure with the value of count set to 0 as it was when the effect callback ran. Every second, this callback then calls setCount(0 + 1), so the count never goes above 1. Finally, another possible reason you’re seeing stale props or state is if you use the “dependency array” optimization but didn’t correctly specify all the dependencies.
React Hooks vs Redux – You Might Not Need Redux
Redux also has the Redux Devtools, which allow you to see the history of actions and state changes in your app over time. Historically, Redux was originally created as an implementation of the “Flux Architecture”, which was a pattern first suggested by Facebook in 2014, a year after React came out. Following that announcement, the community created dozens of Flux-inspired libraries with varying approaches to the Flux concepts.
Despite the occasional hype about this or that library or React feature being a “Redux Killer,” none of them has yet unseated the champion in the Darwinian battle royale that is the React ecosystem. I also believe that it’s best to remain critical of including dependencies that can have such a dramatic impact on your application, though, and that means being aware of the alternatives. With this in mind, I decided to explore the possibility of using a useReducer hook to manage global application state. You can now fire up the create-react-app server using the yarn start command. Click the buttons to ensure that increment and decrement functions are working. However, when it comes to handling complex data structures, you’ll need the useReducer hook.
State Management in React Using Redux Toolkit (RTK)
Create a new file within the store directory again, but this time it will be called helpers.js. UseMemo lets you memoize an expensive calculation if the dependencies are the same. However, it only serves as a hint, and doesn’t guarantee the computation won’t re-run. But sometimes you need to be sure an object is only created once.
Redux came out in 2015, and quickly won the “Flux Wars” because it had the best design, matched the problems people were trying to solve, and worked great with React. I will give you the best scalable approach to manage sharing data across your application and working with your backend APIs through React hooks that I am using in all my React apps. State management is possible with React Hooks without a third-party tool such as Redux. In fact, it is a straightforward approach because you don’t need to deal with the installation of a third-party tool. Also, it can be said that you write less code by implementing state management with Hooks. The store holds the app state globally without depending on the component hierarchy.
Then, the object property can be instantiated in the component just like any other prop. With the component now connected to the store and fetching the state, the component will be re-rendered each time the state changes. A component can get the state from the store without knowing which other component declared that state or updated it. Then, a third component can update the state based on user interaction with your app. All components listening to the state are updated per the newly-updated state. Deciding what to wrap in a container is completely at the developer’s discretion.
- At that point, we really might as well just use Redux and take advantage of all the awesome middleware and debug tooling it has available.
- This state can be accessed by all the children nested inside Provider.
- While doing it we can still operate on concepts we already know, like actions, state or reduce function.
- A reducer is a function that takes the current state and based on the action it received, returns a new state.
For useState, you only need to have a single setValue() function for overwriting existing state values. This results in a fairly effective solution for state management in React applications. And yet, far too many React developers default to Redux for state management without considering the alternatives. In this tutorial, we’ll introduce you to the React Context API for state management and explain how React Hooks and the Context API can replace Redux. When comparing development time, you can relate it to reducing application size by avoiding the installation of redux and react-redux libraries. When the default state has been generated for each reducer, it adds it to the single source of truth store by assigning the value to the name of the reducer function.