There is now a debate whether or not you need redux, with the release of react hooks and the context API. We have previously suggested a custom Hook called usePrevious to hold the previous value. However, we’ve found that most use cases fall into the two patterns described above.
Make sure everyone on your team is on board with using them and familiar with this documentation. We don’t recommend rewriting your existing classes to Hooks unless you planned to rewrite them anyway (e.g. to fix bugs). Recoil is a fairly new state management tool developed by Facebook. In Recoil, each piece of state is called an atom, and atoms can be combined with selectors. You can combine atoms and selectors to create data structures unique for your application. The idea is that the setvalue function fires an event with a parameter carrying the value and the event handler updates the hooks internal state.
Should I use Hooks, classes, or a mix of both?
If you need to test a custom Hook, you can do so by creating a component in your test, and using your Hook from it. From React’s point of view, a component using Hooks is just a regular component. If your testing solution doesn’t rely on React internals, testing components with Hooks shouldn’t be different from how you normally test components. There are no plans to remove classes from React — we all need to keep shipping products and can’t afford rewrites. We’re not encouraging you to use these tools, nor we’re saying they are better than Redux or Context API.
This was a very trivial example to demonstrate the power of Redux. As you can imagine, Redux can be used to handle much more complex states. Context is ideal to use for sharing global data such as current authenticated user, theme, or the user language. The store has one responsibility, that responsibility is to hold the application state. It is highly encouraged to keep only one store in any application that uses Redux. The job of the provider is to define and track certain pieces of state.
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After completing this piece, I happened upon a clear and concise summary of different ways to use React hooks to manage global state. Daishi Kato does a great job of exploring the pros and cons of each approach, and the two libraries he’s written around Redux and React Hooks state management look really interesting. I highly recommend heading over there if you’re interested in digging deeper. This is great for performance, because it allows us to pass down just the pieces of app state that our components require, which cuts down on unnecessary re-renders when unrelated pieces of the state change. However, It also increases the number of components we need to build and maintain.
On the other hand, with React Hooks and the useContext API, there is no need to install external libraries or add a bunch of files and folders to make our app work. This makes it a much simpler, more straightforward approach to handling global state management in React applications. Sometimes using React Hooks is efficient enough, sometimes it is not.
To handle data between disconnected components in React, developers use prop drilling. Therefore, if you want to pass data from a top-level component to, for instance, 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. As you can now see, the store provider (our react context api component) is the root/parent component for other components to be placed in, in order to make use of the context API. In more complex cases (such as if one state depends on another state), try moving the state update logic outside the effect with the useReducer Hook.
In this tutorial, we explored the differences between using Redux for state management in React apps and using the React Context API with the useContext and useReducer Hooks. When we use Redux for state management, we have to deal with prop drilling, meaning we have to write a lot of extra code just to get our application started. By using Context to nest components within components, all the functionality from the parent component is available in the child components.
It was built to centralize the state in one single place and handle all its state changes. UseState is recommended for handling simple values like numbers or strings. However, when it comes to handling complex data structures, you will need to use useReducer.
- We just need to add in one more file that will make using our react hooks and context api state management system a little easier.
- If you first click “Show alert” and then increment the counter, the alert will show the count variable at the time you clicked the “Show alert” button.
- I am also an open source contributor to projects such as GatsbyJS.
While doing it we can still operate on concepts we already know, like actions, state or reduce function. Note that you can still choose whether to pass the application state down as props (more explicit) or as context (more convenient for very deep updates). If you use context to pass down the state too, use two different context types — the dispatch context never changes, so components what is redux for that read it don’t need to rerender unless they also need the application state. We just need to add in one more file that will make using our react hooks and context api state management system a little easier. Let’s step through this bit by bit to understand how we can create our react hooks and context api state management system using the context API, and React hooks.
