Learn Algolia, Mobx and Nightmare

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Developing logic-rich applications is a key skill to have.

The TypeScript–React combination helps you unlock that skill, and it’s a great developer experience in terms of writing understandable and refactorable HTML. But the default state management for React has a long way to go to feel simple and maintainable — and that’s where MobX makes your life so much easier. MobX keeps things simple without using complicated setups like `provider` and `connect` that provide way too little value for all the mental overhead. 

In this course, you’ll see how to model your React application logic using simple JavaScript classes — and with the help of MobX, make those classes the beating heart of your React applications. You’ll learn:

- that you don't need advanced annotations and TypeScript features to use MobX
- how to easily refactor code through TypeScript
- how to use TypeScript to track the flow of state as properties change

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.

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Develop React Applications with Mobx and TypeScript

MobX State Tree (MST) is a library that helps you organize your application states in a very structured manner. It allows you to create a component model, but for your data!

Course instructor Michel Weststrate—creator of Mobx—will teach you to model application state after your problem domain with MST. You will get hands-on practice and see how MST lets you solve problems with its out-of-the-box support for asynchronous actions, patches, snapshots, and middleware.

Over the 17 lessons, you’ll build a little bookshop application using React, MST, and create-react-app, while learning how to manage the lifecycle of your data by describing data models. 

Join Michel in one of the most popular courses on egghead!

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree

MobX is designed to enable building web applications with a complex data model in an intuitive and very performant manner. Using React and MobX is currently the simplest way to build component based web applications.

"Half the code, twice the fun" is how people describe MobX, or "So simple, I cannot believe it just works". 



Manage Complex State in React Apps with MobX

Since MST offers a runtime type system, it can create and compose types on the fly, making it possible to reuse logic in new and powerful ways.

In this lesson you will learn:
* That MST types are immutable and composed together behind the scenes
* How to compose types explicitly by using `types.compose`
* How to create dynamic, parameterized types by leveraging that MST types are first class javascript citizens

Create Dynamic Types and use Type Composition to Extract Common Functionality

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

Applications are driven by state. Many things, like the user interface, should always be consistent with that state.
[MobX](https://mobxjs.github.io/mobx) is a general purpose FRP library that provides the means to derive, for example, a React based user interface automatically from the state and keep it synchronized.

The net result of this approach is that writing applications becomes really straight-forward and boilerplate free.

Sync the UI with the app state using MobX observable and observer in React

This lesson explains how you can build larger trees of react component and how they are managed efficiently by MobX. You will learn how to pass observable data structures around in props and how the Devtools can be used to analyze the performance of your UI.

Pass observable data through props in MobX

This lesson explains how actions can be used to control and modify the state of your application. They help you to structure your code base and integrate well with the MobX React Devtools. Actions automatically create transactions, which group changes together.

Use MobX actions to change and guard state

Derivations form the backbone of MobX and come in two flavors: computed values are values that can be derived from the state automatically. And reactions can be used to manage side effects, such as drawing the user interface. In this lesson you will learn how these concepts relate to each other and how they are optimized automatically by MobX.

Derive computed values and manage side effects with MobX reactions

In this lesson we will finally do something useful with our temperatures. We extend it into a small app in which users can enter a location, which is used as input for an external API to fetch weather data. In the mean time MobX keeps our UI in sync with the current state of the request.

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