Do you need action creators when working with Redux hooks?

Question

This is an odd question, but I haven't been able to find an explicit answer for it. In my project I'm using Redux with new Redux hooks, useSelector and useDispatch. The setup is as standard as it gets:

Reducer:

const reducer = (state = defaultState, action) => {
switch (action.type) {
type SOME_ACTION:
return { 
...state, 
someVariable: action.payload 
}
default: 
return state
}

Synchronous actions:

export function someAction(payload) {
return { 
type: SOME_ACTION
payload: payload 
}

And in the components I dispatch actions using dispatch({type: SOME_ACTION, payload: payload}).

Recently I've noticed that dispatching works just fine even if the action creator doesn't exist: as in, if the SOME_ACTION type is listed in the reducer switch operator, but there is no function someAction(payload). The question is: is writing the action creators redundant in this case? What are the best practices when working with Redux hooks?

Drew Reese Drew Reese · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-03T08:07:10

You can certainly use action object literals

dispatch({ type: 'MY_SUPER_AWESOME_ACTION });

But creating action creators allow you to reuse code more efficiently.

const mySuperAwesomeAction = () => ({ type: 'MY_SUPER_AWESOME_ACTION });

And now anywhere in your app where you need to dispatch this action you import the action and use

dispatch(mySuperAwesomeAction());

As apps grow and actions are used in multiple components if you were using object literals you would need to find/replace all instances of the action literal, and hope you didn't typo any of them. With the single action creator definition you need only update it in a single location.

Do you need action creators when working with Redux hooks?

1 Answers