Do You Really Need Redux? Pros and Cons of this State Management Library

Now we’re going to listen to any changes in the store, and then console.log() the current state of the store. Because of this, you can do time travel through all the states from the time the app was booted on your browser. When you’re learning Redux, there are a few core concepts that you need to get used to. The image below describes the Redux architecture and how everything is connected together.

Even in 2022 and onward, Redux is here to stay and remain popular among developers. Redux is still popular for helping developers build consistent user interfaces and cope with complex logic for app state management. React ships with all the features you need to handle your state without a single additional library. Most of your application’s states should not be global as they live just fine in a useState or useReducer or custom hook next to your components. If a higher-level component is provided with a dozen props and uses only two of them, and the rest are passed down to a lower-level component, then consider refactoring with Redux.

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Redux creates a global store that resides at the top level of your application and feeds the state to all other components. Unlike Flux, Redux doesn’t have multiple store objects. The entire state of the application is within that store object, and you could potentially swap the view layer with another library with the store intact. However, if a state needs to be shared with a lot of components that belong to different parts of the app structure, the data flow gets more complex. In such cases, the so-called props drilling problem appears. Props drilling is a bad practice of passing properties through components down the hierarchy without having them used in the process.

“Redux is used in 55% of React apps and is going to be around for a long time”. 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. Some of that complexity is obvious while many other unobvious gotchas are hidden and waiting for you to trip on it.

Why do React developers love Redux for state management?

As shown in the image, Redux takes away the responsibility from individual components to manage a state. Instead, we create a single store that handles our state management. On top of that, all communication regarding reading, updating, or creating data happens via the store. Moreover, components can listen to state changes to update the UI and avoid these data inconsistency bugs.

• Redux creates a global store that resides at the top level of your application and feeds the state to all other components.
• So, the reducers make a copy of the entire current state first, make the necessary changes, and then return a fresh new instance of the state – with all the necessary changes/ updates.
• If you haven’t run across these before, you can read more about them here.

Put in your email below and we’ll email you a PDF that walks you through building an app in React – step-by-step, from empty folder to a working app. In the master/detail example, the list can extract the names of all items in the list and render them, and the detail component can extract and show all the attributes of the one item. When we have two children who need access to the same data, the React docs encourage you to “lift state up”, which means putting the data in the nearest ancestor of the two components. But hopefully it also settled each piece of Redux in your understanding – at least a little bit. When we code out a Redux application, try to keep this skit and the bank analogy in mind!

Okay but what does this have to do with Redux?

What this means is that a reducer should be a pure function. Given a set of inputs, it should always return the same output. Also, a reducer is not the place for side effects such as making AJAX calls or fetching data from the API. Redux has a configureStore method to create a new store. You need to pass it a reducer, although we don’t know what that is.

In most cases, more code is required to perform simple actions like button clicks or simple UI changes. Perhaps simple actions and UI changes don’t have to be a part of the Redux store and can be maintained at the component level. For instance, when you interact with the price filter slider, the product view changes. This can obviously work if we have a parent component calling the child component and share properties. For complex apps, it becomes difficult to manage the state and update history between multiple components. While our application grows to a higher number of components, maintaining data consistency becomes a hairy challenge.

As we said earlier, every reducer controls one piece of the store. We package them up together into a single object (known by convention as the rootReducer) by using a Redux function called combineReducers. This allows the reducer to determine what to do based on what type of action it has received. If you haven’t run across these before, you can read more about them here. Draw out a symbolic representation of a recent React app you’ve built! Mark which components have state, and draw lines connecting them to represent props being passed.

Therefore, with redux, you can easily track down when, where, and why a component has changed. We use React Redux as the official UI binding library for React which provided a lot of performance optimizations so that a component re-renders only when it is needed. The state accepts a default value, the initialState, why redux which will be used only if the value of the state is undefined. Otherwise, the actual value of the state will be retained. We use the switch statement to select the right action. However, we need a mechanism to convert the information provided by the action and transform the state of the store.