Creating Items with Redux

Learning Goals

Dispatch actions to the Redux store from a React component
Update state in Redux based on an action

Introduction

With this lesson, we will begin our journey in implementing the CRUD actions while using the Redux pattern.

Our Goal

We'll build a form in Redux that allows us to create a list of todos. This is a form that would have only one input, for the name of the todo, and the submit button.

Create The Form in React

If you boot up the application (run npm install && npm start), you'll see that there in the src/App.js file we reference a CreateTodo form located at src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js. That's where we need to build our form.

So in that file we want to change our component to look like the following:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js

import React from "react";

function CreateTodo() {
  return (
    <div>
      <form>
        <p>
          <label>add todo</label>
          <input type="text" />
        </p>
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>
    </div>
  );
}

export default CreateTodo;

Plan for Integrating into Redux

Let's think about how we want to integrate this into Redux. Upon submitting the form, we would like to dispatch the following action to the store:

const action = {
  type: "todos/todoAdded",
  payload: todo,
};

If the user has typed in buy groceries, our action would look like:

const action = {
  type: "todos/todoAdded",
  payload: "buy groceries",
};

How do we get that text from the form's input? Well, we can use our normal React trick of updating the CreateTodo component's state whenever someone types something into the form. Then, when the user clicks on the submit button, we can grab that state, and call:

dispatch({ type: "todos/todoAdded", payload: text });

Time to implement it! Step one will be updating the component state whenever someone types in the form.

1. Create a Controlled Form

Every time the input is changed, we want to change the state. To do this we first add an event handler for every input that changes. Inside the CreateTodo component, we change our returned JSX to the following:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js
function CreateTodo() {
  return (
    <div>
      <form>
        <p>
          <label>add todo</label>
          <input type="text" onChange={handleChange} />
        </p>
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>
    </div>
  );
}

All this code does is say that every time the user changes the input field (that is, whenever the user types something in) we should call our handleChange() function (which we haven't written yet).

Our code calls the handleChange() function each time the user types in the input, but we still need to write that handleChange function. Let's start with the old way, setting a state value:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js
import React, { useState } from "react";

function CreateTodo() {
  const [text, setText] = useState("");

  function handleChange(event) {
    setText(event.target.value);
  }

  return (
    <div>
      <form>
        <p>
          <label>add todo</label>
          <input type="text" onChange={handleChange} />
        </p>
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>
    </div>
  );
}

To make a completely controlled form, we will also need to set the value attribute of our input element to our text state variable. This way, every key stroke within input will call a setText from within handleChange, the component will re-render and display the new value for text.

The CreateTodo component should look like the following now:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js
import React, { useState } from "react";

function CreateTodo() {
  const [text, setText] = useState("");

  function handleChange(event) {
    setText(event.target.value);
  }

  return (
    <div>
      <form>
        <p>
          <label>add todo</label>
          <input type="text" onChange={handleChange} value={text} />
        </p>
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>
      <p>Form Text: {text}</p>
    </div>
  );
}

export default CreateTodo;

Note: Inside the returned JSX, we wrapped our form in a div, and then at the bottom of that div we've added a <p> tag to display the text from state. This isn't necessary for functionality, but we do this just to visually confirm that we are properly changing the state. If we see our DOM change with every character we type in, we're in good shape.

It's on to step 2.

2. Handle Form Submit and Dispatch an Action

We need to make changes to our form so that when the user clicks submit, we dispatch an action to the store. Notice that a lot of the setup for Redux is already done for you. Open up the ./src/index.js file. There you'll see the following:

// ./src/index.js
import React from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import { Provider } from "react-redux";
import App from "./App";
import store from "./store";

ReactDOM.render(
  <Provider store={store}>
    <App />
  </Provider>,
  document.getElementById("root")
);

Our application is wrapped in the Provider component from react-redux, which allows us to access our Redux store from any component we like.

Let's give the CreateTodo component a way to update the store. We'll want to import useDispatch, as well as our action creator:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js
import { useDispatch } from "react-redux";
import { todoAdded } from "./todosSlice";

function CreateTodo() {
  const dispatch = useDispatch();
  // ...
}

On submission of the form in our component, we want to send the value we've captured in the local state to be added to our Redux store by dispatching the action.

Now we need to update the CreateTodo component to call a callback on the submission of a form:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js

<form onSubmit={handleSubmit}>

The handleSubmit() function:

// ./src/features/todos/CreateTodo.js

function handleSubmit(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  dispatch(todoAdded(text));
}

// ...

When handleSubmit() is called, whatever is currently stored in text will be sent off to our reducer via our dispatched action. The full component ends up looking the like the following:

import React, { useState } from "react";
import { useDispatch } from "react-redux";
import { todoAdded } from "./todosSlice";

function CreateTodo() {
  const [text, setText] = useState("");
  const dispatch = useDispatch();

  function handleChange(event) {
    setText(event.target.value);
  }

  function handleSubmit(event) {
    event.preventDefault();
    dispatch(todoAdded(text));
  }

  return (
    <div>
      <form onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
        <p>
          <label>add todo</label>
          <input type="text" onChange={handleChange} value={text} />
        </p>
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>
      <p>Form Text: {text}</p>
    </div>
  );
}

export default CreateTodo;

Now, when the form is submitted, whatever the text is will be dispatched to the reducer with the action.

3. Update State

We are properly dispatching the action, but the state is not being updated. What could be the problem? Well remember our crux of Redux flow:

Action -> Reducer -> New State

If the action is properly dispatched, our problem must lie with our reducer. Open up the file ./src/features/todos/todoSlice.js.

There is a todoAdded method in our reducer, but currently it does nothing:

  reducers: {
    todoAdded(state, action) {
      // update meeee
    },
  },

In this function, you'll want to add the new todo from the action into state. Normally, we'd have to worry about creating a new state without mutating state. However, since we're using the createSlice function from Redux Toolkit to set up our reducer, we can just push the new todo into our array!

todoAdded(state, action) {
  // using createSlice lets us mutate state!
  state.entities.push(action.payload);
},

Once you change the todoAdded() reducer to the above function, open up the Redux DevTools in your browser, and try clicking the submit button a few times. The DevTools will show that our reducer is adding new values every time the form is submitted!

Conclusion

There's a lot of typing in this section, but three main steps.

First, we made sure the React component of our application was working. We did this by building a form, and then making sure that whenever the user typed in the form's input, the state was updated.
Second, we connected the component to Redux by importing the useDispatch hook, along with the action creator
Third, we built our reducer such that it responded to the appropriate event and concatenated the payload into our array of todos.

sereyatiampati/react-hooks-redux-forms-codealong