Understanding micro state management
What is micro state management? There is no officially established definition yet; however, let's try defining one here.
Important Note
This definition may not reflect community standards in the future.
State, in React, is any data that represents the user interface (UI). States can change over time, and React takes care of components to render with the state.
Before we had React hooks, using monolithic state libraries was a popular pattern. A single state covers many purposes for better developer experience, but sometimes it was overkill because the monolithic state libraries can contain unused functionalities. With hooks, we have a new way to create states. This allows us to have different solutions for each specific purpose that you need. Here are some examples of this:
- Form state should be treated separately from a global state, which is not possible with a single-state solution.
- Server cache state has some unique characteristics, such as refetching, which is a different feature from other states.
- Navigation state has a special requirement that the original state resides on the browser end and, again, a single-state solution doesn't fit.
Fixing these issues is one of the goals of React hooks. The trend with React hooks is to handle various states with special solutions for them. There are many hook-based libraries to solve things such as form state, server cache state, and so on.
There's still a need for general state management, as we will need to deal with states that are not covered by purpose-oriented solutions. The proportion of work left for general state management varies on apps. For example, an app that mainly deals with server states would require only one or a few small global states. On the other hand, a rich graphical app would require many large global states compared to server states required in the app.
Hence, solutions for general state management should be lightweight, and developers can choose one based on their requirements. This is what we call micro state management. To define this concept, it's lightweight state management in React, where each solution has several different features, and developers can choose one from possible solutions depending on app requirements.
Micro state management can have several requirements, to fulfill developers' various needs. There are base state management requirements, to do things such as these:
- Read state
- Update state
- Render with state
But there may be additional requirements to do other things, such as these:
- Optimize re-renders
- Interact with other systems
- Async support
- Derived state
- Simple syntax; and so on
However, we don't need all features, and some of them may conflict. Hence, a micro state management solution cannot be a single solution either. There are multiple solutions for different requirements.
Another aspect to mention regarding micro state management and its library is its learning curve. Ease of learning is important for general state management too, but as the use cases covered by micro state management can be smaller, it should be easier to learn. An easier learning curve will result in a better developer experience and more productivity.
In this section, we discussed what micro state management is. Coming up, we will see an overview of some hooks that handle states.