Book Image

Architecting Angular Applications with Redux, RxJS, and NgRx

Book Image

Architecting Angular Applications with Redux, RxJS, and NgRx

Overview of this book

Managing the state of large-scale web applications is a highly challenging task with the need to align different components, backends, and web workers harmoniously. When it comes to Angular, you can use NgRx, which combines the simplicity of Redux with the reactive programming power of RxJS to build your application architecture, making your code elegant and easy to reason about, debug, and test. In this book, we start by looking at the different ways of architecting Angular applications and some of the patterns that are involved in it. This will be followed by a discussion on one-way data flow, the Flux pattern, and the origin of Redux. The book introduces you to declarative programming or, more precisely, functional programming and talks about its advantages. We then move on to the reactive programming paradigm. Reactive programming is a concept heavily used in Angular and is at the core of NgRx. Later, we look at RxJS, as a library and master it. We thoroughly describe how Redux works and how to implement it from scratch. The two last chapters of the book cover everything NgRx has to offer in terms of core functionality and supporting libraries, including how to build a micro implementation of NgRx. This book will empower you to not only use Redux and NgRx to the fullest, but also feel confident in building your own version, should you need it.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Data flow

OK, so we know about actions, reducers, and manipulating the state in a pure way. What about putting all this in practice in a real application? How would we do that? Let's try to model the data flow of our application. Imagine that we have a view that handles adding an item to a list and a view that handles showing the list. Then, our data flow could look like the following:

In the case of the create item view, we enter the data we need to create an item and then we dispatch an action, create-item, which ends up adding the item to the store. In our other data flow, we simply have a list view that selects the items from the store, which leads to the list view being populated. We realize that in a real application there may be the following steps:

  1. User interaction
  2. Creation of an action that represents our intent
  3. Dispatching an action, which leads to our state changing...