React apps are developed using components, and they internally handle their state. This works fine for applications with a small number of components, but as the application gets larger, it becomes challenging to manage the complexity of shared states between components. Here is a straightforward illustration of an e-commerce application where purchasing a product can alter the status of several components. To solve the problem of prop drilling we create a global state that all the components can access, regardless of what level of nesting they are at. In my view, there is little overlap between hooks and Redux. Instead, it enhanced the API for things we could already do with React.
Consider building an app with Undo and Redo functionality. With Redux, implementing undo functionality is rather easy. This is because the state is immutable and mutations are already described as discrete actions, which is close to the undo stack mental model. The most important thing here is that, unlike Redux, Context API is not a state management system. Instead, it’s a dependency injection mechanism where you manage a state in a React component. We get a state management system when using it with useContext and useReducer hooks.
Example of Redux and Context API Counter
Reducers are simple functions that carry out the behavior of the action. They begin with the application’s current state, take action, and then return a new state. React Context enables you to share data that can be considered global for a tree of React components, like the current authenticated user, theme, or preferred language. To some extent, Redux works well for state management in React applications and has a few advantages.
In earlier versions of React, Context was still an experimental feature and intended to manage the global state, just like Redux state. This produces a similar result with less code and a much simpler process. Be the first to be informed about our new courses, articles & more.
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Bit’s open-source tool help 250,000+ devs to build apps with components. Providers is to define and keep track of specific pieces of state. This state can then be accessed by all the why redux child components nested inside the Provider. These child components, known as Consumers, are responsible for accessing or modifying the state provided by the Context Provider.
Assuming that your app does use Redux, you need to determine what parts of the state are stored in the Redux store, and what parts are stored in React component state. In this post, I’ll lay out a few of the factors that I use to determine where state will live. Just about any app you write needs a way to manage state. Redux manages state and state transformations and is often used with React, but React has its own concept of state.
The type attribute tells what type of action is performed, this tells us what the action has done. To solve the problem of state management, Redux, and Context API are the most popular solutions. They aim to solve the same problem but tackle them using a different approach. If you do put something into Redux state, you should always read it from Redux state. For all state in Redux, Redux should be your single source of truth for that state.
In a typical React app, when a user performs an action and changes a component’s state, it can have an impact on the state of any number of other components. However, the more complex it gets, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the dependencies. An important aspect of response time is the time spent on initial load. That time is directly proportional to the amount of data sent from the server and the speed of the network. Since many components relied on shouldComponentUpdate for performance optimizations, the legacy context was useless for passing down plain data. Context API is a different approach to tackling the data flow problem between React’s deeply nested components.
If you draw different lines on when to use them, leave me a comment. Without Hooks, the Context API might not seem like much when compared to Redux. But, when combined with the useReducer Hook, we have a solution that finally solves the state management problem in React.
- When any of the libraries are updated, we can be sure that it will still behave as expected.
- If you’re using Redux just to avoid passing props, you can switch to Context API instead.
- You can get more information about this on react documentation.
- It’s advised to use it in the same way as the old context, for static values.
- React supplies a useReducer hook that will interface with your Redux-style reducers.
This makes the app run faster without having to load the same elements all over again – they’re simply stored in Redux. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct. Redux thunk is a middleware and it monitors or observes any dispatch action that passes through the system. Delete href attribute to prevent it from changing the page. To my mind, Redux, is still a little confusing for the first time of studying this library, and need some time to understand and start to use one.