- Write a reducer.
- The reducer should be a pure function.
- Write a reducer that takes an action(payload).
Each year, around the holidays especially, we forget who we need to buy presents for. Let's write a function that will help us manage our gift recipient list. We should be able to add a person we need to buy a present for and remove people we no longer like (or who give us socks every year!).
In this lab, we will focus on writing two reducers to help us handle this task.
Since we're drilling down into one concept, React is not set up in this lab, nor
is there an index.html
file. Follow the instructions below and implement your
code in src/reducers/manageFriends.js
and src/reducers/managePresents.js
.
-
In
managePresents.js
, write a function calledmanagePresents()
that takes in the previous state and an action as its argument. Set an default value for the state argument - an object with a key,numberOfPresents
, assigned to0
.Actions passed into this reducer will only have a type attribute, so they would look something like this:
action = { type: "INCREASE" }
If the reducer receives a
type
set to"INCREASE"
, return a new state where the value ofnumberOfPresents
is increased by one. Use the tests to guide you as you build out this reducer. -
In
manageFriends.js
, write a function calledmanageFriends
that takes in the previous state and an action as its argument. Here, the initial state should be an object with a key,friends
, set to an empty array.This time, the reducer should be able to handle two actions,
"ADD_FRIEND"
and"REMOVE_FRIEND"
. When adding a friend, the action will include afriend
key assigned to an object withname
,hometown
, andid
keys.action = { type: "ADD_FRIEND", friend: { name: "Chrome Boi" homewtown: "NYC", id: 1 } }
When our reducer receives
"ADD_FRIEND"
, it should return a new state with this friend object added to thefriends
array.When removing a friend, instead of an object, the action will include an
id
key with an integer. Find the friend with the matchingid
and remove them. Thought of in another way, the reducer is really returning a new state with an array offriends
that includes everyone except the removed friend.action = { type: "REMOVE_FRIEND", id: 1 }
Both reducers should be pure functions. This means that the functions cannot change any object defined outside of the functions. It also means that given an input, the reducers will always return the same output.
As the Redux documentation notes:
Since one of the core tenets of Redux is to never mutate state, you'll often find yourself using
Object.assign()
to create copies of objects with new or updated values.
If you remember, Object.assign()
is a function that takes any number of
arguments. It works by copying over from left to right the properties in each
object passed as an argument. Let's go over an example:
let dog = {id: 1, name: 'scooby', color: 'brown', age: 4};
// if scooby had a birthday, we could write:
let olderDog = Object.assign({}, dog, {age: dog.age + 1})
Translating this to English would be something like, "Start with a new empty
object, copy over everything from the original dog
, then overwrite the age
property with a new value."
While effective, using Object.assign()
can quickly make simple reducers
difficult to read given its rather verbose syntax.
An alternative approach is to use the object spread syntax, which lets you use the spread (...) operator to copy enumerable properties from one object to another in a more succinct way
let dog = {id: 1, name: 'scooby', color: 'brown', age: 4};
let olderDog = {...dog, age: dog.age + 1}
This would translate to the same English, "Return a new object that contains all
the key-value pairs from dog
copied over with the age
key overwritten with a
new value".