Entity Adapter — React: Redux Toolkit

A big part of any web application comes down to operations on entities, adding, changing, deleting, and reading them. For example, in every Hexlet lesson, you can find a discussion section and ask some questions. This section of the front end handles posts, comments, authors, and likes. Thanks to data normalization, the code for processing these entities looks identical:

const addPost = (state, post) => {
  state.entities[post.id] = post;
  state.ids.push(post.id);
};

const addLike = (state, like) => {
  state.entities[like.id] = like;
  state.ids.push(like.id);
};

We will use the same code for all other entities. Is there any way to reuse it? Of course! Redux Toolkit does this using the Entity Adapter mechanism. It provides a set of ready-made reducers and selectors for basic entity operations. First, an example:

import {
  createSlice,
  createEntityAdapter,
} from '@reduxjs/toolkit';

const usersAdapter = createEntityAdapter();

// By default: { ids: [], entities: {} }
const initialState = usersAdapter.getInitialState();

const slice = createSlice({
  name: 'users',
  initialState,
  reducers: {
    addUser: usersAdapter.addOne,
    addUsers: usersAdapter.addMany,
    removeUser: usersAdapter.removeOne,
    updateUser: usersAdapter.updateOne,
  },
});

// Somewhere in the application

// By convention, the passed data must have an `id` in it to properly work
dispatch(addUser(user));
// The data are transmitted in this format: { id, changes }
dispatch(updateUser({ id: user.id, changes: data }));
// It's enough to pass the identifier
dispatch(removeUser(user.id));

Just four lines in the reducers brought us a full implementation of standard operations on the user. But that is not all. Besides ready-made reducers, Entity Adapter gives us a set of ready-made selectors to retrieve data from the store. To do this, they must be generated and exported from the file with the slice:

// file: usersSlice.js

// Callback defines a basic selector that extracts the desired part of the state from Redux
// For the `usersSlice`, it's `state.users`
export const selectors = usersAdapter.getSelectors((state) => state.users);

Example of its use in the application:

import { useSelector, useDispatch } from 'react-redux';

import { selectors } from '../slices/usersSlice.js';

const MyComponent = (props) => {
  // Retrieving all users as an array
  // The data from `state.users.entities` is selected internally
  // And it is sorted by `state.users.ids`
  const users = useSelector(selectors.selectAll);

  // Here's the logic of the output
}

In addition to the selectAll(state) we get:

• selectIds(state) – returns ids
• selectEntities(state) – returns entities
• selectTotal(state) – returns the total amount

• selectById(state, id) – returns a specific entity or undefined if it found nothing

  // The `id` is some identifier
  const user = useSelector((state) => selectors.selectById(state, id));
  

Recommended materials

1. What is CRUD?
2. The documentation of `createEntityAdapter`
3. Creating Your Own Selectors

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• Article “How to Learn and Cope with Negative Thoughts“
• Article “Learning Traps“
• Article “Complex and simple programming tasks“