In the vast majority of React apps you do not need this.
I work on an app that has a total of about 400 separate Redux actions across half a dozen reducers and a couple of stores. There's a lot of things that cause side effects. Being about to see what actions fired with various props is immensely useful for debugging. redux-devtools and Reactotron are immensely useful. You're right that the majority of React apps don't need to trace actions, but when you do you definitely won't think it's overrated.
Can you give me an example how you got to 400 actions? Just enumerate like 5 or so, I’m assuming you are building features where groups of actions are just necessary based on the patterns you are using.
I’m genuinely curious because I feel like this kind of inflation of actions/reducers in Redux is what makes it nightmarish.
For one thing they do encourage a lot of tiny actions. A frequent pattern I use requires three actions for every server call: one to trigger a saga, one when it succeeds, and one for when it fails.
The standard form is incredibly verbose, I've started to shift away from it.
Note that the new `createAsyncThunk` API in Redux Toolkit handles generating and dispatching the promise lifecycle actions for you [0]. Also, while sagas are a great power tool, most Redux apps don't need them [1].
Awesome! It's great to finally have some links to share.
The company I'm currently working with is the first time I've used sagas / observables / "anything async is through side effects". I've constantly been saying "this is madness, this giant block of code, all these concepts, all this room for things to go wrong, just to do a `fetch`?". It's also the first time in a few years of using redux I've had to deal with race conditions.
Edit: Oh, and you can even `await dispatch`! All the things I've been doing in Redux for years and told I shouldn't, now being officially endorsed.
Can you give me an example how you got to 400 actions?
I'm not going to go in to detail on HN, but the app I work on is used to make diagrams for the legal industry and to define how they change over time. It's sort of like Visio for lawyers, with a basic animation editor that understands the underlying data. There are a lot of actions simply because it does a lot of things that can't be generalised in to higher level actions (well, they could, but it'd be messy.)
Have you used it? That’s like saying the Chrome debugger or CPU call stacks are overrated. It’s a debug feature that any React+Redux app can use to trace back why something happened. I’ve used it a few times, and when you need it because you don’t understand why an action was triggered, it’s super convenient.
any application that you need to debug, I have not ran into a application React or not that I didn't need to debug and Redux does help with debugging greatly.
