Actor

An actor is just a glorified action creator – "glorified" meaning it has one tiny property: type. This is the type property that should be set on all actions created by the actor.

Definition

interface Actor<T extends string> extends ActionCreator<T> {
  type: T
  toString(): T
}

type - Some string that identifies the actions created by this actor. Avoid using names starting with '@@zedux/' as these are reserved for internal Zedux action types.

toString() - An actor's toString() method should be overwritten with a function that returns the actor's type.

Examples

That tiny type property is a surprising asset. This one little detail is what eliminates string constants in Zedux. Instead of:

const INCREMENT = 'INCREMENT'

const increment = () => ({ type: INCREMENT })

const reducer = (state = 0, action) {
  const amount = action.type === INCREMENT

  return state + amount
}

we get:

const increment = () => ({ type: increment.type })

increment.type = 'increment'

// not necessary here, but for the sake of completeness:
increment.toString = () => increment.type

const reducer = (state = 0, action) {
  const amount = action.type === increment.type

  return state + amount
}

This doesn't seem like much in this example, but it allows us to create awesome apis like state() and transition() or act() and react():

import { act, react } from 'zedux'

const increment = act('increment')

const reducer = react(0)
  .to(increment)
  .withReducers(state => state + 1)

Notes

While there's nothing wrong with putting actors together yourself, Zedux ships with a high-level api for creating them. See the ZeduxActor api for more info.