The Flux architectural pattern using useReducer, the Context API, and Sagas

Just in case, here is a nice diagram about the generic Flux pattern in React.

So, why am I writing about this?

It demonstrates the combination of :

• Context API and useContext hook
• useReducer hook
• useReactSaga custom hook

Demo Link | GitHub Repo

But why, you ask ?

Because I can ;)

No, but seriously, because I needed to make sense of Redux, of the Context API, and more generally, the Flux Pattern, and of async actions.

Also, to me, it is important to understand as many React functions or third-party packages as I include in my apps, and useContext and useReducer being shipped defacto with React is a plus, versus having to include a whole bunch of packages that revolve around the Redux ecosystem.

So this demo allows to demonstrate that the redux and react-redux packages are no longer required dependencies to implement the Flux Pattern in React, in a way that makes both sense and is scalable with combined reducers to handle endless future slices of state.

Word of caution

What this demo does not demonstrate though, is if this combination mimicking redux will be as performant as redux.
And this, I do not know myself, as this is very experimental. I wouldn't recommend using this in production ;).

Notes

This demo depends on a tiny package called use-react-saga.

All it is, is a custom hook for React which depends on the redux-saga package, which is something I wanted to experiment with as the next natural evolution step after redux-thunk, for async actions.

Addendum

After the perusal of the installed packages in the node_modules directory, I have come to realize that there is a redux directory in there!! After perusing the yarn.lock file, redux-saga packages has it as a dependency.

So this demo does NOT unfortunately demonstrate that adding Redux as a dependency can be avoided. Fortunately, it is only 2kB, including dependencies!

So this demo only goes to shows how unavoidable redux is when it comes to making stable apps ;)

In the particular case of this demo, if I wish to remove it as a dependency, I must implement Sagas myself. Is it worth it ? I'll leave it up to you to decide.

Finally, I should mention that I do not hold a grudge against Redux, I just wanted to evaluate the Context API as a potential replacement, since we see so many articles on this topic, but they all show very small unscalable demos or POCs which were never convincing to me.