Why not re-frame effect handler?

[olimsaidov]

Is there any reason behind why this lib does not integrate itself to re-frame as an effect handler?

[oliyh]

No real reason, it would be quite trivial to add though

[oliyh]

Although @olimsaidov you can always have a dispatch event which would look almost identical, i.e. effects of:

{:dispatch [::re-graph/query ...]}

vs

{::re-graph/query [...]}

Could you explain to me the benefits of the second (or drawbacks of the first)?

Thanks

[olimsaidov]

I am fairly new to clojurescript, but, after reading re-frame docs I learned that all side-effects must be handled via effect handlers. Also there are many third-party libraries for re-frame which use effect handlers for making side-effects: https://github.com/olieidel/awesome-re-frame#effect-handlers

[oliyh]

re-graph does do all its side-effecty things (creating websockets, sending messages) via fx handlers. In fact, a dispatch is an effect itself, just one that happens to be built into re-frame. So, the two snippets I wrote above are functionally equal.

If I were to write fx handlers for the re-graph API they would look like this:

(re-frame/reg-fx
  ::query
  (fn [& args]
    (re-frame/dispatch (into [::query] args))))

So you see the fx handler would just be an extra step to achieve the same thing. With a dispatch it does the same thing, however, you have added flexibility to dispatch-n or dispatch-later as well.