The store will persist across the entire application, which is also accessible throughout the whole application by using the useStore hook. The second and most important helper function, called combineReducers will take an array of reducers, and use a closure to store that data. Now we have our reducers sorted, let’s create the helper functions like the combineReducer function I mentioned earlier. Before we get to that let’s take a look at another file that we are importing called reducers.js, which contains all of our reducers. Thanks to the Rules of Hooks, we know that Hooks are only called from React components (or custom Hooks — which are also only called from React components). We didn’t choose useRef in this example because an object ref doesn’t notify us about changes to the current ref value.

• In our store.js file, we used the createContext() method from React to create a new context.
• The latest Flow and TypeScript React definitions include support for React Hooks.
• You can access the complete project used in this tutorial at this GitHub Repository.
• In this tutorial, you’re going to learn a new way of handling state in your React projects, without writing excessive code or installing a bunch of libraries — as is the case with Redux.

To solve this problem, we need to provide a global state that all components can access, no matter how deeply nested they are. Create the last file in the store directory again, which we will call actions.js. If the state has changed, when compared to the current, it will return the updated store.

function useClientRect()

Using the Hooks API, we can apply the same basic functional programming concepts that Redux uses to transform state without introducing additional dependencies or creating double the components. Let’s take a look at how we can combine contexts and the useReducer hook to create a store that all of the components in a React app can talk to. TL;DR The useReducer React hook provides a Redux-like means of managing state transitions, but it’s no replacement for Redux when it comes to managing a global application state tree. It’s super useful at a lower level in the component hierarchy for handling pieces of state that are dependent on one another, instead of declaring a bunch of useState hooks, though. The useReducer react hook, takes in a reducer that uses a state and an action, and then the useReducer function will give you the current state and a dispatch function to be able to update it further. Once that has been bootstrapped, cd into the project (cd react-hooks-and-context-api) and create a new folder within the src directory called store.

When you have moderately complex React component state management needs within a specific section of your application. If you are developing a React application, the most simple way of managing your global state and access to your backend is through React Hooks. It removes asynchronous wiring and boilerplate from your application and replaces it with just a few lines of code. Returning to the Hooks example, you don’t need many of the steps required to create a state, store information on it, and then later change it to something new. You can use the mapDispatchToProps function to perform changes in the state.

How to read an often-changing value from useCallback?

This, unfortunately, came with the expense of writing boilerplate code. But now it’s possible to replace Redux with React Hooks and the Context API. The most popular way for handling shared application state in React is using a framework such as Redux. One of the biggest problems was ‘prop drilling’ which was common with nested components. This unfortunately came with the expense of writing boilerplate code — but now, it’s possible to replace Redux with React Hooks and the Context API.

The most popular way to handle shared application state in React is using a framework such as Redux. Quite recently, the React team introduced several new features which include React Hooks and the Context API. what is redux for These two features effectively eliminated a lot of challenges that developers of large React projects have been facing. One of the biggest problems was “prop drilling”, which was common with nested components.

Shared State

I am a staff software engineer specializing in React, JavaScript and TypeScript with over 8 years of professional experience. I have worked with companies such as Atos, The Telegraph, Capgemini, Babylon Health and more. I am also an open source contributor to projects such as GatsbyJS. React.memo doesn’t compare state because there is no single state object to compare.

You can define it in the top-level component and make the state global. There’s a lot of posts out there that recommend setting up multiple separate contexts for different chunks of state, both to cut down on unnecessary re-renders and to scope concerns. Sure, it’s possible to write code that way, but at that point you’re just reinventing React-Redux, poorly. Context provides a way to share values like these between components without having to explicitly pass a prop through every level of the tree. Of course, now that we’re passing props manually again, we’re starting to lose much of the convenience that keeping a global state object gives us. We need to keep track of what we’re sending where, and the likelihood that we’ll forget to pass a needed prop down to a child component increases proportionally to the level of nesting.

Both approaches have their strengths and choosing the right one will depend on the scale, nature, and goals of your application. When we need to manipulate our state, we’ll call the dispatch method and pass in an object with the desired type as its argument. To some extent, Redux works well for state management in React applications and has a few advantages.

The identity of the dispatch function from useReducer is always stable — even if the reducer function is declared inside the component and reads its props. In the Redux version, we were required to map state to props and dispatch to props for every component we wanted to connect to our Redux store. It works and actually I saw some projects running in production using that approach (at least they were small projects). But the functionality of the useContext hook is to distribute Data/Objects, not Manage a global State.