Are action creators legacy?

[ShMcK]

Dispatch is basically made of a bunch of action creators organized by model.

See createDispatcher

The current design potentially offers the following benefits

• potential autocomplete for dispatches (not really working)
• immediate referencing of the action creator

Idea 1: Hacky JavaScript ?

But if all action creators are all essentially the same code, is there a way to create action creators on the fly?

dispatch.count.addBy(5)
// someone how captures "count" as model
// someone captures "addOne" as the action
// somehow captures the param "5" as payload

Although, I don't think the above would work dynamically,

Idea 2: Dispatch as a Function

it's possible to reference dispatches in a way that would work. Some examples:

dispatch('count', 'addBy', 5)
dispatch('count/addBy', 5)

This would call dispatch['count']['addBy'](5). Boom.

Or some variation of above.

The only benefit really being that you don't have to create action creators on startup, and hold them in memory through the life of the app. Note that this is what most standard redux apps do anyway, it just strikes me as wasteful.

I'm not sure how you would structure this if you were adding extra properties to the action, like "meta". But we don't currently handle any situations like that anyway.

dispatch('count/addBy', 5, { meta: something: true })

Summary

Consider this more of a thought experiment than a proposal.

[blairbodnar]

Definitely some cool ideas here! @ShMcK

Perhaps we could provide the flexibility for both. By default, create the action creators on start up, but also have options to change that behavior.

Maybe two options like this:

1. A top level option that tells rematch to create all action creators on the fly.

init({ lazyActionCreators: true })

2. A model option that tells rematch to only create action creators on the fly for that specific model.

model({
  lazyActionCreators: true,
  name: 'count',
  ...
})

[ShMcK]

Not a bad idea. But the slippery slope of configuration might be better avoided.

I chatted with Scott today about this. I'll summarize the key points

The ideal dispatch API should:

• autocomplete
• have a simple API
• throw an error or warning if you dispatch an invalid action

Probably the current API has the most hope and getting all three.

[blairbodnar]

Yup yup, agreed. And depending on your IDE, The autocomplete kinda works anyways.

[ShMcK]

You and your amazing WebStorm.

Anything else you'd like in an action?

[blairbodnar]

haha, yup, WebStorm makes me happy!

Can't think of much else for now. Idea # 2 you mentioned above would be cool though!

So far, my day to day use with mirror is pretty nice, so I'm happy so far with what we have!