Redux is a terribly simple library for state management, and has made working with React more manageable for everyone. However, there are a lot of cases where people blindly follow boilerplate code to integrate redux with their React application without understanding all the moving parts involved.

There is an entire library, called react-redux whose sole purpose is to seamlessly integrate redux’s state management into a React application. I feel that it’s important to know what’s going on when you do something that essentially forms the backbone of your application.

State Management In React and Redux

At this point it’s hard for some to believe, but redux and React are actually two separate libraries which can and have been used completely independent of each other. Lets take a look at redux’s state management flow :

redux flow diagram

If you have worked with redux before, you know that its functionality revolves around a “store”, which is where the state of the application lives. There is no way anyone can directly modify the store. The only way to do so is through reducers, and the only way to trigger reducers is to dispatch actions. So ultimately :

To change data, we need to dispatch an action

On the other hand, when we want to retrieve data, we do not get it directly from the store. Instead, we get a snapshot of the data in the store at any point in time using store.getState() , which gives us the “state” of the application as on the time at which we called the getState method.

To obtain data we need to get the current state of the store

Now, let’s come to the (simplified) component structure of a standard react todo-mvc application :

react flow diagram

Linking the Redux Store

If we want to link our React application with the redux store, we first have to let our app know that this store exists. This is where we come to the first major part of the react-redux library, which is the Provider.

Provider is a React component given to us by the “react-redux” library. It serves just one purpose : to “provide” the store to its child components.

//This is the store we create with redux's createStore method
const store = createStore(todoApp, {})

// Provider is given the store as a prop
render(
  <Provider store={store}>
    <App />
  </Provider>,
  document.getElementById('app-node')
)

Since the provider only makes the store accessible to it’s children, and we would ideally want our entire app to access the store, the most sensible thing to do would be to put our App component within Provider.

If we were to follow the previous diagram, the Provider node would be represented as a parent node on top of the App node. However, because of the utility that Provider gives us, I feel it’s more appropriate to represent it as something which “wraps” the entire application tree, like this :

react flow diagram with provider

Connecting Redux

Now that we have “provided” the redux store to our application, we can now connect our components to it. We established previously that there is no way to directly interact with the store. We can either retrieve data by obtaining its current state, or change its state by dispatching an action (we only have access to the top and bottom component of the redux flow diagram shown previously).

This is precisely what connect does. Consider this piece of code, which uses connect to map the stores state and dispatch to the props of a component :

import { connect } from 'react-redux'

const TodoItem = ({ todo, destroyTodo }) => {
  return (
    <div>
      {todo.text}
      <span onClick={destroyTodo}> x </span>
    </div>
  )
}

const mapStateToProps = state => {
  return {
    todo: state.todos[0]
  }
}

const mapDispatchToProps = dispatch => {
  return {
    destroyTodo: () =>
      dispatch({
        type: 'DESTROY_TODO'
      })
  }
}

export default connect(
  mapStateToProps,
  mapDispatchToProps
)(TodoItem)

mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps are both pure functions that are provided the stores “state” and “dispatch” respectively. Furthermore, both functions have to return an object, whose keys will then be passed on as the props of the component they are connected to.

In this case, mapStateToProps returns an object with only one key : “todo”, and mapDispatchToProps returns an object with the destroyTodo key.

The connected component (which is exported) provides todo and destroyTodo as props to TodoItem.

final connect flow

It’s important to note that only components within the Provider can be connected (In the above diagram, the connect is done through the Provider).

Redux is a powerful tool and even more so when combined with React. It really helps to know why each part of the react-redux library is used, and hopefully after reading this post, the function of Provider and connect is clear.

If you want to know how to use redux in an efficient and easy to use manner for calling APIs, you should read my other post on a simplified approach to calling APIs with redux