Context API + Use Reducer gives Redux Feeling😍😍

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3 min read

If you are a beginner to state management and want to manage your react app state like a pro but don't want to use Redux as it has much complexity like:

  1. take time to set up,
  2. create a store
  3. dispatch action, make reducers,
  4. mapDispatchToProps or mapStateToProps etc

It is not a good idea in my opinion to use redux for a small application when you have an inbuilt state management solution provided by React that is Context Api.

You can use context Api with UseReducer in four steps

  1. create context by using CreateContext(),This gives us provider and consumer which we can use to provide and consume data in other components
import {createContext}  from "react"

const todoContext=createContext()

export default todoContext

2- create a component which uses your above todocontext and help you to wrap your top-level parent so that you can pass data to any child component and get data back from the child to the parent component.

import TodoContext from "./todoContext";
const AppState = (props) => {

  const addTodo = (todo) => {
  };

  const toggleTodo = (id) => {
  };

  const deleteTodo = (id) => {
  };

  const [state, dispatch] = useReducer(reducer, intialState);
  return (
    <TodoContext.Provider
      value={{ todos: state.todos, addTodo, toggleTodo, deleteTodo }}
    >
      {props.children}
    </TodoContext.Provider>
  );
};

export default AppState;

As you can see my TodoContext.provider has a value property that he uses to pass the data and update the data in components.

3- Create a Reducer file -- Basically, it is a function that has 2 parameters, state, and action.
the state is used to update or manipulate the state where an action is an object where we have action type and payload.
through action type, we can tell our reducer which state we want to change and for payload, it only contains data, which we want to update our state.
To understand more about useReducer and Reducer read this. useReducer

import { ADD_TODO, TOGGLE_TODO, DELETE_TODO } from "./Actions";

//as we know reducer is a function that is used to manipulate the state

const reducer = (state, action) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case ADD_TODO:
      return {
        ...state,
        todos: [...state.todos, action.payload]
      };


    default:
      return state;
  }
};

export default reducer;

4- There is also a good practice where we put our Actions(actions means which operation we want to perform basically it's a String which we pass in our reducer ,so that our reducer can distinguish different operations)

 export const ADD_TODO = "ADD_TODO";
export const TOGGLE_TODO = "TOGGLE_TODO";
export const DELETE_TODO = "DELETE_TODO";

5- Now this is the last step where you learn how to update your state from child components and get state object to display output.
To use our context API in child component we only need

import { useContext } from "react";
import todoCtx from "../../context/todoContext";

then we pass our todoCtx in useContext Hook

  const { todos, toggleTodo, deleteTodo } = useContext(todoCtx);

Here you can see we take the value from our todo context (step 2) and we can use these in our component.

import TodoItem from "../TodoItem/TodoItem";
import { useContext } from "react";
import todoCtx from "../../context/todoContext";

const TodoList = () => {
  const { todos, toggleTodo, deleteTodo } = useContext(todoCtx);
  return (
    <ul>
      {todos.map((todo) => {
        return (
          <TodoItem
            key={todo.id}
            text={todo.text}
            complete={todo.isComplete}
            clickToToggle={() => toggleTodo(todo.id)}
            clickToDelete={() => deleteTodo(todo.id)}
          />
        );
      })}
    </ul>
  );
};

export default TodoList;

CODE SANDBOX LINK

Let me know what's your opinion about Redux vs Context API which is good in your opinion. πŸ˜… πŸ˜… πŸ˜… πŸ˜…

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