Actions

Whenever the state in your store needs to be updated in response to an event, you dispatch an action to your store with any relevant information required to make said update. An action is usually a Lua table with a type field. They are usually created via an action creator Lua module like the following:

local function ReceivedNewPhoneNumber(phoneNumber)
    return {
        type = "ReceivedNewPhoneNumber",
        phoneNumber = phoneNumber,
    }
end

return ReceivedNewPhoneNumber

We can then dispatch an action to our store via Store:dispatch like so:

local store = Store.new(function(currentState, action)
    -- The body of your reducer
end)

store:dispatch(ReceivedNewPhoneNumber("15552345678"))

Info

In most cases your action will be sent directly to the reducer to be processed. However, if you specified any middleware when initializing your store, your action might also be processed by that middleware.

Additionally, Rodux provides a helper method called makeActionCreator to generate 'action creators'. These are a lot like the ReceivedNewPhoneNumber function above, except for two key differences:

• Instead of functions, action creators returned from makeActionCreator are callable tables that also include a name field.
• Action creators will automatically populate the type field of each action they create using their name.

We can define an action creator like this:

return makeActionCreator("ReceivedNewPhoneNumber", function(phoneNumber)
    return {
        phoneNumber = phoneNumber,
    }
end)

Since the name of the action creator populates the type of the actions it creates, we can use an action creators name to identify actions that were created by it. As we'll see in the Reducers section, this is helpful for determining which action we're processing:

    local MyAction = require(MyAction)
    ...
    if action.type == MyAction.name then
        -- change some state!
    end

Info

Actions are nothing more than tables with a type field, so there are many ways to generate them! If makeActionCreator doesn't work for your project, you can always generate actions and action creators however you like!