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05 - Redux, Immutable, and Fetch

Code for this chapter available here.

In this chapter we will hook up React and Redux to make a very simple app. The app will consist of a message and a button. The message changes when the user clicks the button.

Before we start, here is a very quick introduction to ImmutableJS, which is completely unrelated to React and Redux, but will be used in this chapter.

ImmutableJS

💡 ImmutableJS (or just Immutable) is a library by Facebook to manipulate immutable collections, like lists and maps. Any change made on an immutable object returns a new object without mutating the original object.

For instance, instead of doing:

const obj = { a: 1 }
obj.a = 2 // Mutates `obj`

You would do:

const obj = Immutable.Map({ a: 1 })
obj.set('a', 2) // Returns a new object without mutating `obj`

This approach follows the functional programming paradigm, which works really well with Redux.

When creating immutable collections, a very convenient method is Immutable.fromJS(), which takes any regular JS object or array and returns a deeply immutable version of it:

const immutablePerson = Immutable.fromJS({
  name: 'Stan',
  friends: ['Kyle', 'Cartman', 'Kenny'],
})

console.log(immutablePerson)

/*
 *  Map {
 *    "name": "Stan",
 *    "friends": List [ "Kyle", "Cartman", "Kenny" ]
 *  }
 */

Redux

💡 Redux is a library to handle the lifecycle of your application. It creates a store, which is the single source of truth of the state of your app at any given time.

Let's start with the easy part, declaring our Redux actions:

  • Run yarn add redux redux-actions

  • Create a src/client/action/hello.js file containing:

// @flow

import { createAction } from 'redux-actions'

export const SAY_HELLO = 'SAY_HELLO'

export const sayHello = createAction(SAY_HELLO)

This file exposes an action, SAY_HELLO, and its action creator, sayHello, which is a function. We use redux-actions to reduce the boilerplate associated with Redux actions. redux-actions implement the Flux Standard Action model, which makes action creators return objects with the type and payload attributes.

  • Create a src/client/reducer/hello.js file containing:
// @flow

import Immutable from 'immutable'
import type { fromJS as Immut } from 'immutable'

import { SAY_HELLO } from '../action/hello'

const initialState = Immutable.fromJS({
  message: 'Initial reducer message',
})

const helloReducer = (state: Immut = initialState, action: { type: string, payload: any }) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case SAY_HELLO:
      return state.set('message', action.payload)
    default:
      return state
  }
}

export default helloReducer

In this file we initialize the state of our reducer with an Immutable Map containing one property, message, set to Initial reducer message. The helloReducer handles SAY_HELLO actions by simply setting the new message with the action payload. The Flow annotation for action destructures it into a type and a payload. The payload can be of any type. It looks funky if you've never seen this before, but it remains pretty understandable. For the type of state, we use the import type Flow instruction to get the return type of fromJS. We rename it to Immut for clarity, because state: fromJS would be pretty confusing. The import type line will get stripped out like any other Flow annotation. Note the usage of Immutable.fromJS() and set() as seen before.

React-Redux

💡 react-redux connects a Redux store with React components. With react-redux, when the Redux store changes, React components get automatically updated. They can also fire Redux actions.

  • Run yarn add react-redux

In this section we are going to create Components and Containers.

Components are dumb React components, in a sense that they don't know anything about the Redux state. Containers are smart components that know about the state and that we are going to connect to our dumb components.

  • Create a src/client/component/button.jsx file containing:
// @flow

import React from 'react'

type Props = {
  label: string,
  handleClick: Function,
}

const Button = ({ label, handleClick }: Props) =>
  <button onClick={handleClick}>{label}</button>

export default Button

Note: You can see a case of Flow type alias here. We define the Props type before annotating our component's destructured props with it.

  • Create a src/client/component/message.jsx file containing:
// @flow

import React from 'react'

type Props = {
  message: string,
}

const Message = ({ message }: Props) =>
  <p>{message}</p>

export default Message

These are examples of dumb components. They are logic-less, and just show whatever they are asked to show via React props. The main difference between button.jsx and message.jsx is that Button contains a reference to an action dispatcher in its props, where Message just contains some data to show.

Again, components don't know anything about Redux actions or the state of our app, which is why we are going to create smart containers that will feed the proper action dispatchers and data to these 2 dumb components.

  • Create a src/client/container/hello-button.js file containing:
// @flow

import { connect } from 'react-redux'

import { sayHello } from '../action/hello'
import Button from '../component/button'

const mapStateToProps = () => ({
  label: 'Say hello',
})

const mapDispatchToProps = dispatch => ({
  handleClick: () => { dispatch(sayHello('Hello!')) },
})

export default connect(mapStateToProps, mapDispatchToProps)(Button)

This container hooks up the Button component with the sayHello action and Redux's dispatch method.

  • Create a src/client/container/message.js file containing:
// @flow

import { connect } from 'react-redux'

import Message from '../component/message'

const mapStateToProps = state => ({
  message: state.hello.get('message'),
})

export default connect(mapStateToProps)(Message)

This container hooks up the Redux's app state with the Message component. When the state changes, Message will now automatically re-render with the proper message prop. These connections are done via the connect function of react-redux.

  • Update your src/client/app.jsx file like so:
// @flow

import React from 'react'
import HelloButton from './container/hello-button'
import Message from './container/message'
import { APP_NAME } from '../shared/config'

const App = () =>
  <div>
    <h1>{APP_NAME}</h1>
    <Message />
    <HelloButton />
  </div>

export default App

We still haven't initialized the Redux store and haven't put the 2 containers anywhere in our app yet:

  • Edit src/client/index.jsx like so:
// @flow

import 'babel-polyfill'

import React from 'react'
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'
import { AppContainer } from 'react-hot-loader'
import { Provider } from 'react-redux'
import { createStore, combineReducers } from 'redux'

import App from './app'
import helloReducer from './reducer/hello'
import { APP_CONTAINER_SELECTOR } from '../shared/config'
import { isProd } from '../shared/util'

const store = createStore(combineReducers({ hello: helloReducer }),
  // eslint-disable-next-line no-underscore-dangle
  isProd ? undefined : window.__REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION__ && window.__REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION__())

const rootEl = document.querySelector(APP_CONTAINER_SELECTOR)

const wrapApp = (AppComponent, reduxStore) =>
  <Provider store={reduxStore}>
    <AppContainer>
      <AppComponent />
    </AppContainer>
  </Provider>

ReactDOM.render(wrapApp(App, store), rootEl)

if (module.hot) {
  // flow-disable-next-line
  module.hot.accept('./app', () => {
    // eslint-disable-next-line global-require
    const NextApp = require('./app').default
    ReactDOM.render(wrapApp(NextApp, store), rootEl)
  })
}

Let's take a moment to review this. First, we create a store with createStore. Stores are created by passing reducers to them. Here we only have one reducer, but for the sake of future scalability, we use combineReducers to group all of our reducers together. The last weird parameter of createStore is something to hook up Redux to browser Devtools, which are incredibly useful when debugging. Since ESLint will complain about the underscores in __REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION__, we disable this ESLint rule. Next, we conveniently wrap our entire app inside react-redux's Provider component thanks to our wrapApp function, and pass our store to it.

🏁 You can now run yarn start and yarn dev:wds and hit http://localhost:8000. You should see "Initial reducer message" and a button. When you click the button, the message should change to "Hello!". If you installed the Redux Devtools in your browser, you should see the app state change over time as you click on the button.

Congratulations, we finally made an app that does something! Okay it's not a super impressive from the outside, but we all know that it is powered by one badass stack under the hood.

Extending our app with an asynchronous call

We are now going to add a second button to our app, which will trigger an AJAX call to retrieve a message from the server. For the sake of demonstration, this call will also send some data, the hard-coded number 1234.

The server endpoint

  • Create a src/shared/routes.js file containing:
// @flow

// eslint-disable-next-line import/prefer-default-export
export const helloEndpointRoute = (num: ?number) => `/ajax/hello/${num || ':num'}`

This function is a little helper to produce the following:

helloEndpointRoute()     // -> '/ajax/hello/:num' (for Express)
helloEndpointRoute(1234) // -> '/ajax/hello/1234' (for the actual call)

Let's actually create a test real quick to make sure this thing works well.

  • Create a src/shared/routes.test.js containing:
import { helloEndpointRoute } from './routes'

test('helloEndpointRoute', () => {
  expect(helloEndpointRoute()).toBe('/ajax/hello/:num')
  expect(helloEndpointRoute(123)).toBe('/ajax/hello/123')
})

  • Run yarn test and it should pass successfully.

  • In src/server/index.js, add the following:

import { helloEndpointRoute } from '../shared/routes'

// [under app.get('/')...]

app.get(helloEndpointRoute(), (req, res) => {
  res.json({ serverMessage: `Hello from the server! (received ${req.params.num})` })
})

New containers

  • Create a src/client/container/hello-async-button.js file containing:
// @flow

import { connect } from 'react-redux'

import { sayHelloAsync } from '../action/hello'
import Button from '../component/button'

const mapStateToProps = () => ({
  label: 'Say hello asynchronously and send 1234',
})

const mapDispatchToProps = dispatch => ({
  handleClick: () => { dispatch(sayHelloAsync(1234)) },
})

export default connect(mapStateToProps, mapDispatchToProps)(Button)

In order to demonstrate how you would pass a parameter to your asynchronous call and to keep things simple, I am hard-coding a 1234 value here. This value would typically come from a form field filled by the user.

  • Create a src/client/container/message-async.js file containing:
// @flow

import { connect } from 'react-redux'

import MessageAsync from '../component/message'

const mapStateToProps = state => ({
  message: state.hello.get('messageAsync'),
})

export default connect(mapStateToProps)(MessageAsync)

You can see that in this container, we are referring to a messageAsync property, which we're going to add to our reducer soon.

What we need now is to create the sayHelloAsync action.

Fetch

💡 Fetch is a standardized JavaScript function to make asynchronous calls inspired by jQuery's AJAX methods.

We are going to use fetch to make calls to the server from the client. fetch is not supported by all browsers yet, so we are going to need a polyfill. isomorphic-fetch is a polyfill that makes it work cross-browsers and in Node too!

  • Run yarn add isomorphic-fetch

Since we're using eslint-plugin-compat, we need to indicate that we are using a polyfill for fetch to not get warnings from using it.

  • Add the following to your .eslintrc.json file:
"settings": {
  "polyfills": ["fetch"]
},

3 asynchronous actions

sayHelloAsync is not going to be a regular action. Asynchronous actions are usually split into 3 actions, which trigger 3 different states: a request action (or "loading"), a success action, and a failure action.

  • Edit src/client/action/hello.js like so:
// @flow

import 'isomorphic-fetch'

import { createAction } from 'redux-actions'
import { helloEndpointRoute } from '../../shared/routes'

export const SAY_HELLO = 'SAY_HELLO'
export const SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST = 'SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST'
export const SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS = 'SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS'
export const SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE = 'SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE'

export const sayHello = createAction(SAY_HELLO)
export const sayHelloAsyncRequest = createAction(SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST)
export const sayHelloAsyncSuccess = createAction(SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS)
export const sayHelloAsyncFailure = createAction(SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE)

export const sayHelloAsync = (num: number) => (dispatch: Function) => {
  dispatch(sayHelloAsyncRequest())
  return fetch(helloEndpointRoute(num), { method: 'GET' })
    .then((res) => {
      if (!res.ok) throw Error(res.statusText)
      return res.json()
    })
    .then((data) => {
      if (!data.serverMessage) throw Error('No message received')
      dispatch(sayHelloAsyncSuccess(data.serverMessage))
    })
    .catch(() => {
      dispatch(sayHelloAsyncFailure())
    })
}

Instead of returning an action, sayHelloAsync returns a function which launches the fetch call. fetch returns a Promise, which we use to dispatch different actions depending on the current state of our asynchronous call.

3 asynchronous action handlers

Let's handle these different actions in src/client/reducer/hello.js:

// @flow

import Immutable from 'immutable'
import type { fromJS as Immut } from 'immutable'

import {
  SAY_HELLO,
  SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST,
  SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS,
  SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE,
} from '../action/hello'

const initialState = Immutable.fromJS({
  message: 'Initial reducer message',
  messageAsync: 'Initial reducer message for async call',
})

const helloReducer = (state: Immut = initialState, action: { type: string, payload: any }) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case SAY_HELLO:
      return state.set('message', action.payload)
    case SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST:
      return state.set('messageAsync', 'Loading...')
    case SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS:
      return state.set('messageAsync', action.payload)
    case SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE:
      return state.set('messageAsync', 'No message received, please check your connection')
    default:
      return state
  }
}

export default helloReducer

We added a new field to our store, messageAsync, and we update it with different messages depending on the action we receive. During SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST, we show Loading.... SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS updates messageAsync similarly to how SAY_HELLO updates message. SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE gives an error message.

Redux-thunk

In src/client/action/hello.js, we made sayHelloAsync, an action creator that returns a function. This is actually not a feature that is natively supported by Redux. In order to perform these async actions, we need to extend Redux's functionality with the redux-thunk middleware.

  • Run yarn add redux-thunk

  • Update your src/client/index.jsx file like so:

// @flow

import 'babel-polyfill'

import React from 'react'
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'
import { AppContainer } from 'react-hot-loader'
import { Provider } from 'react-redux'
import { createStore, combineReducers, applyMiddleware, compose } from 'redux'
import thunkMiddleware from 'redux-thunk'

import App from './app'
import helloReducer from './reducer/hello'
import { APP_CONTAINER_SELECTOR } from '../shared/config'
import { isProd } from '../shared/util'

// eslint-disable-next-line no-underscore-dangle
const composeEnhancers = (isProd ? null : window.__REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION_COMPOSE__) || compose

const store = createStore(combineReducers({ hello: helloReducer }),
  composeEnhancers(applyMiddleware(thunkMiddleware)))

const rootEl = document.querySelector(APP_CONTAINER_SELECTOR)

const wrapApp = (AppComponent, reduxStore) =>
  <Provider store={reduxStore}>
    <AppContainer>
      <AppComponent />
    </AppContainer>
  </Provider>

ReactDOM.render(wrapApp(App, store), rootEl)

if (module.hot) {
  // flow-disable-next-line
  module.hot.accept('./app', () => {
    // eslint-disable-next-line global-require
    const NextApp = require('./app').default
    ReactDOM.render(wrapApp(NextApp, store), rootEl)
  })
}

Here we pass redux-thunk to Redux's applyMiddleware function. In order for the Redux Devtools to keep working, we also need to use Redux's compose function. Don't worry too much about this part, just remember that we enhance Redux with redux-thunk.

  • Update src/client/app.jsx like so:
// @flow

import React from 'react'
import HelloButton from './container/hello-button'
import HelloAsyncButton from './container/hello-async-button'
import Message from './container/message'
import MessageAsync from './container/message-async'
import { APP_NAME } from '../shared/config'

const App = () =>
  <div>
    <h1>{APP_NAME}</h1>
    <Message />
    <HelloButton />
    <MessageAsync />
    <HelloAsyncButton />
  </div>

export default App

🏁 Run yarn start and yarn dev:wds and you should now be able to click the "Say hello asynchronously and send 1234" button and retrieve a corresponding message from the server! Since you're working locally, the call is instantaneous, but if you open the Redux Devtools, you will notice that each click triggers both SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST and SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS, making the message go through the intermediate Loading... state as expected.

You can congratulate yourself, that was an intense section! Let's wrap it up with some testing.

Testing

In this section, we are going to test our actions and reducer. Let's start with the actions.

In order to isolate the logic that is specific to action/hello.js we are going to need to mock things that don't concern it, and also mock that AJAX fetch request which should not trigger an actual AJAX in our tests.

  • Run yarn add --dev redux-mock-store fetch-mock

  • Create a src/client/action/hello.test.js file containing:

import fetchMock from 'fetch-mock'
import configureMockStore from 'redux-mock-store'
import thunkMiddleware from 'redux-thunk'

import {
  sayHelloAsync,
  sayHelloAsyncRequest,
  sayHelloAsyncSuccess,
  sayHelloAsyncFailure,
} from './hello'

import { helloEndpointRoute } from '../../shared/routes'

const mockStore = configureMockStore([thunkMiddleware])

afterEach(() => {
  fetchMock.restore()
})

test('sayHelloAsync success', () => {
  fetchMock.get(helloEndpointRoute(666), { serverMessage: 'Async hello success' })
  const store = mockStore()
  return store.dispatch(sayHelloAsync(666))
    .then(() => {
      expect(store.getActions()).toEqual([
        sayHelloAsyncRequest(),
        sayHelloAsyncSuccess('Async hello success'),
      ])
    })
})

test('sayHelloAsync 404', () => {
  fetchMock.get(helloEndpointRoute(666), 404)
  const store = mockStore()
  return store.dispatch(sayHelloAsync(666))
    .then(() => {
      expect(store.getActions()).toEqual([
        sayHelloAsyncRequest(),
        sayHelloAsyncFailure(),
      ])
    })
})

test('sayHelloAsync data error', () => {
  fetchMock.get(helloEndpointRoute(666), {})
  const store = mockStore()
  return store.dispatch(sayHelloAsync(666))
    .then(() => {
      expect(store.getActions()).toEqual([
        sayHelloAsyncRequest(),
        sayHelloAsyncFailure(),
      ])
    })
})

Alright, Let's look at what's happening here. First we mock the Redux store using const mockStore = configureMockStore([thunkMiddleware]). By doing this we can dispatch actions without them triggering any reducer logic. For each test, we mock fetch using fetchMock.get() and make it return whatever we want. What we actually test using expect() is which series of actions have been dispatched by the store, thanks to the store.getActions() function from redux-mock-store. After each test we restore the normal behavior of fetch with fetchMock.restore().

Let's now test our reducer, which is much easier.

  • Create a src/client/reducer/hello.test.js file containing:
import {
  sayHello,
  sayHelloAsyncRequest,
  sayHelloAsyncSuccess,
  sayHelloAsyncFailure,
} from '../action/hello'

import helloReducer from './hello'

let helloState

beforeEach(() => {
  helloState = helloReducer(undefined, {})
})

test('handle default', () => {
  expect(helloState.get('message')).toBe('Initial reducer message')
  expect(helloState.get('messageAsync')).toBe('Initial reducer message for async call')
})

test('handle SAY_HELLO', () => {
  helloState = helloReducer(helloState, sayHello('Test'))
  expect(helloState.get('message')).toBe('Test')
})

test('handle SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_REQUEST', () => {
  helloState = helloReducer(helloState, sayHelloAsyncRequest())
  expect(helloState.get('messageAsync')).toBe('Loading...')
})

test('handle SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_SUCCESS', () => {
  helloState = helloReducer(helloState, sayHelloAsyncSuccess('Test async'))
  expect(helloState.get('messageAsync')).toBe('Test async')
})

test('handle SAY_HELLO_ASYNC_FAILURE', () => {
  helloState = helloReducer(helloState, sayHelloAsyncFailure())
  expect(helloState.get('messageAsync')).toBe('No message received, please check your connection')
})

Before each test, we initialize helloState with the default result of our reducer (the default case of our switch statement in the reducer, which returns initialState). The tests are then very explicit, we just make sure the reducer updates message and messageAsync correctly depending on which action it received.

🏁 Run yarn test. It should be all green.

Next section: 06 - React Router, Server-Side Rendering, Helmet

Back to the previous section or the table of contents.