Post Category → State Of React

The 5 Types Of React Application State

I don’t know about you, but when I started writing React apps, I struggled to decide where my state should go. No matter how I re-arranged setState calls, things never felt quite right.

"Messy state"

And maybe that is why I got so excited when I found Redux. Redux gave me a single place to put all my state. Which sounded great in theory.

"What if"

But then I realised that having one spot to put things doesn’t necessarily make them easy to get to.

"Still messy"

It turns out that I needed more than just a place to put things. I also need a system for putting them in the right place.

"Banzai!"

For me, that system came from splitting my state into five categories. It turned the problem of deciding “how does this piece of state relate to all the other state”, into the problem of deciding “what type of state is this”. And as it turns out, this is a whole lot easier.

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State of React #2 – From Inception to Redux

Welcome back to the second instalment of State of React! In case you missed it, the first instalment demonstrated a small app without component state. And it received a bunch of interesting responses, like this one from @metapgmr:

using props as state and claiming that components are … stateless! The React Emperor has no clothes

Yes, the app was basically wearing its birthday suit. And yes, the app did contain state. But no, the state wasn’t in the props – and it wasn’t component state either.

So what was it?

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State of React #1: A Stateless React App?

Have you ever been frustrated with the task of making loading spinners appear at the right time? Or maybe you’ve had trouble making a popup appear when and where you want it? These are both signs that your code suffers from unmanaged state — the bane of basically every web developer on the planet.

And luckily, the React ecosystem is brimming with tools to help. Redux, MobX, Flux and RxJS are just a few. And while they have a number of things in common (including for some reason the letter “x”), the one which stands out the most is that they just convert the problem of “managing” state into the problem of “structuring it”.

But if it seems that there is no way to dull the state of pain, it begs the question — instead of managing our state, why don’t we just avoid it?

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