Building Robust Applications with React, Redux, and Redux Toolkit: A Comprehensive Guide with Examples.

Introduction:

React is a popular JavaScript library used for building user interfaces, while Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. Redux helps manage the state of an application in a predictable manner, making it easier to understand and debug. However, setting up Redux can be a tedious and repetitive process, which is where Redux Toolkit comes in. Redux Toolkit is a package that simplifies the Redux setup process by providing a set of utilities that reduce the amount of boilerplate code required. In this blog, we will explore React, Redux, and Redux Toolkit and see how they can be used together to create a robust and scalable application.

Prerequisites:

To follow along with this blog, you should have a basic understanding of React, Redux, and JavaScript. It would be helpful if you have worked with Redux before and have a basic understanding of how it works.

What is Redux Toolkit?

Redux Toolkit is a package that provides utilities to simplify common Redux use cases. It includes utilities like createSlice, createAsyncThunk, createEntityAdapter, and configureStore. These utilities help reduce the amount of boilerplate code required to set up a Redux store and also make it easier to write reducers and actions.

Creating a React Redux application using Redux Toolkit:

Let's start by creating a new React application using create-react-app.

npx create-react-app my-app

Once the application is created, navigate to the project directory and install the required dependencies.

cd my-app
npm install react-redux redux @reduxjs/toolkit

We can now create a Redux store using Redux Toolkit. Open the src/index.js file and add the following code.

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { Provider } from 'react-redux';
import { configureStore } from '@reduxjs/toolkit';
import counterReducer from './counterSlice';
import App from './App';

const store = configureStore({
  reducer: {
    counter: counterReducer,
  },
});

ReactDOM.render(
  <Provider store={store}>
    <App />
  </Provider>,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

Here, we are importing the Provider component from the react-redux package, which provides the store to all the components in the application. We are also importing the configureStore utility from Redux Toolkit, which allows us to create a Redux store with a set of predefined options. We are also importing the counterReducer from a new file that we will create in the next step. Finally, we are rendering the App component inside the Provider component.

Next, let's create a new file called counterSlice.js inside the src folder.

import { createSlice } from '@reduxjs/toolkit';

const counterSlice = createSlice({
  name: 'counter',
  initialState: {
    value: 0,
  },
  reducers: {
    increment: (state) => {
      state.value += 1;
    },
    decrement: (state) => {
      state.value -= 1;
    },
  },
});

export const { increment, decrement } = counterSlice.actions;
export default counterSlice.reducer;

Here, we are using the createSlice utility from Redux Toolkit to create a slice of the Redux store. A slice is a collection of reducers, actions, and selectors that operate on a specific part of the Redux store. In this case, we are creating a slice for the counter feature.

The createSlice utility takes an object with three properties:

• name: The name of the slice.

• initialState: The initial state of the slice.

• reducers: An object with reducer functions that update the state.

We are defining two reducers in this example: increment and decrement. These reducers update the value property of the state object.

Finally, we are exporting the actions and reducer from this file