React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

RxJS 5-based middleware for Redux. Compose and cancel async actions to create side effects and more.

redux-observable

Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps.
It helps you write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments (client, server, and native), and are easy to test.

redux

RxJS is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences. 


rxjs

***Note: RxJS imports have changed since the publication of this course. Operators now must be passed into `.pipe` to be applied to an observable.***

In this course we will begin with nothing more than an empty directory & a text editor. Through small, focussed lessons we’ll learn how to setup a React project that uses Redux for state management and redux-observable for asynchronous actions. We’ll see how ‘epics’ are registered and how they each receive a ‘stream’ of actions from the store. 

With an understanding of how things work, we’ll move onto solving common problems such as Ajax cancellation, creating sequences of async actions, enabling code reuse through higher-order Observables and much more. 

## **UPDATE:** 
This course is outdated, view updated material here: [Asynchronous State Management with redux-observable v1](https://egghead.io/courses/asynchronous-state-management-with-redux-observable-v1)

Using the popular create-react-app, we’ll look at each and every step necessary to add state management via Redux. We’ll create an App from scratch, then install redux along with the dependencies needed to make it work with React.

Add Redux to a React application

Actions are the backbone of the Redux store. Instead of having state mutations scattered throughout our application, in Redux we define all of our state updates in the form of simple objects that follow the shape, `{ type: string, payload: any }` - in this lesson we’ll see how we propagate actions from within a component and use that action to decide how to modify the state within the store.


Use actions to modify the state of the Redux store

In this lesson we’ll learn exactly what’s needed to incorporate redux-observable into an existing React/Redux application. We’ll learn what ‘Epics’ are, and how they receive a stream of actions and return a stream of actions. In-between is where we get to apply side-effects, call out to external services etc etc. In this lesson we’ll demonstrate the ‘async’ nature of epics by responding to an action with another, delay action.

Add redux-observable to an existing Redux project

Being just another redux-middleware, we can take advantage of existing tools created by the large redux community. Arguably the most valuable & popular amongst these is the rev-tools extension that allows visibility into the lifecycle of the redux store.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redux-devtools/lmhkpmbekcpmknklioeibfkpmmfibljd?hl=en


Debug redux-observable with redux dev-tools

In this lesson we’ll learn how to perform an Ajax request to an external API in response to an action in the redux store. We’ll see how, within the epic, we get access to actions after any reducers have been executed and how we can convert that incoming action into a resulting one that will save the data received into the redux store.

Use redux-observable for simple Ajax requests

With redux-observable, we have the power of RxJS at our disposal - this means tasks that would otherwise be complicated and imperative, become simple and declarative. In this lesson we’ll respond to an action by queuing up 2 separate Ajax requests that will execute sequentially. Then we’ll group the results from both into an array and produce a single action from our epic that will save the data into the redux store

Create a queue of Ajax requests with redux-observable and group the results.

When accepting user input and converting it into a request that talks to the outside world, we can often end up in a situation where responses are no longer relevant. This is a common case in type-ahead style input fields - we would only want to call an external search API after the user has stopped typing for a short amount of time. In this lesson we’ll see how we can begin to combine RxJS operators to solve such problems. 

Debounce user input to avoid repeated Ajax requests

Any application that uses external services such as APIs should be able to handle errors gracefully. Often this requires no more that displaying a message to the user and ensuring the application continues to function. In this lesson we’ll look at how we can convert an error from the network into an action that is dispatched into the Redux store, allowing us to show an error message to the user and prevent the application from crashing.

Handle network errors gracefully

Although ‘epics’ in RxJS are often described as ‘actions in, actions out’, there may be times when you need to ‘bail out’ of an action, or to just ignore the current one given some condition. By learning about RxJS’s `filter` Operator, we’ll see how easy it is to do ‘nothing’ when you need to. We’ll also see how the composition techniques available in RXJS allow us to control the UI in a declarative manner.

Filter a stream to exclude empty values

Sometimes you need to cancel a pending request based on an action performed by the User. In this lesson we’ll see how we can stop an in-flight ajax request by dispatching another action into the store and making use of the Rx operator ‘takeUntil’.

Use an action to cancel an Ajax request

Epics can be unit-tested just like any other function in your application - they have a very specific set of inputs (the action$ stream) and the output is always an Observable. We can subscribe to this output Observable to assert that the actions going back into the Redux are the ones we expect.


Testing the output of epics

Often in unit tests we are focussing on the logic involved in crafting a network request, & how we respond to the result. The external service is unlikely to be under our control, so we need a way to ‘mock’ the Ajax request in a way that allows us to focus on the logic. In this lesson we’ll see how we can pass in dependencies into epics to make testing things Ajax requests easier.

Mocking an ajax request when testing epics

In certain situations, you care more about the final state of the redux store than you do about the particular stream of events coming out of an epic. In this lesson we explore a technique for dispatching actions direction into the store, having the epic execute as they would normally in production, and then assert on the updated store’s state.

Up and Running with redux-observable

Shane Osbourne

UPDATE:

Course Content