context api vs redux vs hooks

Hi Robert, thanks! These are pure functions that implement the action behavior. The Provider component receives a value prop. As of React v16.8, Hooks have allowed implementation of a number of React features in a component without writing a class. In React, Hooks are special functions that allow us to “hook into” its core features. November 25, 2019 useReducer is a Hook built-into React and it helps you with state management. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, 4th Edition, Learn SQL (using MySQL) in One Day and Learn It Well. But there is an important gotcha! For the past few months, I’ve had a steep learning curve on using Hooks and Context in the most effective way possible. These are objects that are used to send data to the Redux store. This is why, for each of 3 modal forms I’ve built, each has their own Context. This, unfortunately, came with the expense of writing boilerplate code. React Hooks 4. On the other hand, with the useContext API and React Hooks, there is no need to install external libraries or add a bunch of files and folders in order to get our app working. The type is usually in all caps with its words separated by underscores. In order to access our state globally, we’ll need to wrap our root component in our StoreProvider before rendering it in our ReactDOM.render() function: Now, our store context can be accessed from any component in the component tree. Any child component of the container will be able to access the context object using the useContext function. …. It will give you more maintainable software. e.g. For your second question, can you confirm that you’re using the useContext Hook to access your store? Thank you very much. Let’s go the next section, where we’ll set up an example that’s a bit more advanced using the useReducer hook. However, Redux is far from dead or be killed by React Context. This is done by creating a Context Object using the createContext function provided by the React library. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. To create a context, we’ll use the createContext method from React, which accepts a parameter for its default value: The createContext method returns an object with a Provider and a Consumer component: The Provider component is what makes the state available to all child components, no matter how deeply nested they are within the component hierarchy. Nice @ how blog post completely missed that Redux is a few lines of code, uses context internally, and has dev tools + you don’t need to dumpster dive in codebases (along with time travel, a very simple pattern, middleware, consistent interfaces, selectors, immutability and much lower likelihood to miss render waste, without diving into debugger, etc). Thank You for this article ! You’ll need to declare functions that can change one or more of these state values. LogRocket is like a DVR for web apps, recording literally everything that happens on your React app. The global / lifted up state with useContext + useState/useReduce combo is possible way, but be aware about the performance problems – the whole app (down from provider lever) is re-rendered on every state change. There is only one store in any Redux application: Since our application can only have one Redux store, in order to create a single root reducer for all our components, we’ll need the combineReducers method from Redux. They typically have two properties: a type property for describing what the action does and a payload property that contains the information that should be changed in the app state. This is something I’m working through now and there doesn’t seem to be many articles on the subject. Just like the reduce() method in JavaScript, the useReducer Hook receives two values as its argument — a reducer function and an initial state — and then returns a new state: In the above block, we’ve defined our state and a corresponding method, dispatch, handling it. Thanks! …. All the downsides you listed to Redux are quite elegantly solved in Redux-Toolkit. These two features effectively eliminated a lot of challenges that developers of large React projects have been facing. Add caching to selectors and you get awesome perfs. That’s all well and good, if your app is truly simple. If you’re on Windows, I would recommend you install Git Bash. There are two types of state we need to deal with in React projects: Local states can only be used within the components where they were defined. Thanks Rolando, I’m really glad you found this helpful! isLoggedIn })); Context provides useContext hook for this. Also… Hooks are not covered in my bootcamp. I found it funny and ironic that the Log Rocket plug advertises that you can “debug your Redux apps”, when this article advocates to not use Redux, lol. It’s the simple flux pattern. We only need to call the dispatch method and pass in an object with type (the action description as defined in our StateProvider component) as its parameter: To a good extent, Redux works for state management in React applications and has a few advantages, but its verbosity makes it really difficult to pick up, and the ton of extra code needed to get it working in our application introduces a lot of unnecessary complexity. We’ll use create-react-app to jump-start our project quickly: Next, let’s install Semantic UI React, a React-based CSS framework. How do I use this inside a class component (as by Tiago) Follow-up article suggestion: Show the community how to write tests for each of the entities you’ve mentioned, namely Context and Reducers. 2. It cemented knowledge around those specific hooks for me as well. Using the Redux-Toolkit will net you LESS CODE (yes read that again) LESS CODE that a similar implementation in Context. The Redux documentation describes it as a predictable state container for JavaScript applications that helps us to write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments, and are easy to test. document.getElementById(‘component’) With React v16.3.0, the Context API was released, which allows developers to implement global state without installing additional libraries. Amen Brother ! In typical React, the way to handle data between disconnected components is through prop drilling. Since there is no global state that components can access if, for instance, you want to pass data from a top-level component to a fifth-level component, you’ll have to pass the data as a prop on each level of the tree until you get to your desired component. However, this might change in future with the development of a new tool. However, when it comes to handling complex data structures, you’ll need the useReducer hook. It’s really good, got me started using context, thank you. Do you spend a lot of time reproducing errors in your apps? Instance is probably the wrong word. ); , Yes, I’m using useContext in the header.js to consume the User state. >_<, I have almost most of my app with context api. After updating the state from inside the sub-components, the state should be returned back and GUI refreshed as well? When combined with React Hooks, we have a state management solution that is less time-consuming to set up, has an easier learning curve, and requires minimal code. I put a button in the Header component to update the loggedIn to true, when I click the button, the reducer gets executed properly but the Text in header (expected Logged In to change from No to Yes) does not change. The React Context API is React’s way of managing state in multiple components that are not directly connected. Let’s define the component for displaying the count state in src/components/counter-display.js: Next, let’s define the component that will contain buttons for increasing and decreasing the state component. See how much easier it is to write code without dealing with props? For example if you want to store user data in your app then you manually need to pass it from parent to child and in case no of child tree is too much it become really difficult to handle because some time middle child don’t even use that data. React Hooks provide an alternative to writing class-based components by allowing us to easily handle state management from functional components. Before you write any more articles, go use the Redux Toolkit. Apparently the only difference between the two(when trying to decide which to use), is that Redux can handle frequent state changes while Context API cannot. The components will be a child of CounterView, which will act as the container. Hooks (and context) are here predominantly to look after local component state. And yet, far too many React developers default to Redux for state management without considering other alternatives. This is where Redux shines. For this example, we’ll build a simple counter demo consisting of a two-button component and a display component. Hooks and context are not a replacement for Redux. const changeState = () => { In the next section, we’ll look at how we can declare a state using the useState hook and uplifting it to global state. And believe me so will Context API. The next level is the state lifted up to the parent component, when multiple peer / same level components need to share access to the same state (typical case is multi-field forms). The useReducer Hook came with React 16.8. LogRocket also monitors your app's performance, reporting with metrics like client CPU load, client memory usage, and more. This is where the error state variable can be useful in displaying error messages. }; I’m currently using Visual Studio Code, which seems to be the most popular code editor right now (especially for JavaScript developers). Thanks, Andrew. Previously, defining a global state required the installation of a state management framework such as Redux or MobX. Create the state context object src/context/contact-context.js and insert this code: Create the parent component src/views/contact-view.js and insert this code: Create the presentation component src/components/contact-table.js and insert this code: Create the presentation component src/components/contact-form.js and insert this code: Insert the following code in App.js accordingly: After implementing the code, your browser page should refresh.