Where should ajax request be made in Flux app?

Question

I'm creating a react.js application with flux architecture and I am trying figure out where and when a request for data from the server should be made. Is there a any example for this. (Not TODO app!)

Answer 1

I'm a big proponent of putting async write operations in the action creators and async read operations in the store. The goal is to keep the store state modification code in fully synchronous action handlers; this makes them simple to reason about and simple to unit test. In order to prevent multiple simultaneous requests to the same endpoint (for example, double-reading), I'll move the actual request processing into a separate module that uses promises to prevent the multiple requests; for example:

class MyResourceDAO {
  get(id) {
    if (!this.promises[id]) {
      this.promises[id] = new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        // ajax handling here...
      });
    } 
    return this.promises[id];
  }
}

While reads in the store involve asynchronous functions, there is an important caveat that the stores don't update themselves in the async handlers, but instead fire an action and only fire an action when the response arrives. Handlers for this action end up doing the actual state modification.

For example, a component might do:

getInitialState() {
  return { data: myStore.getSomeData(this.props.id) };
}

The store would have a method implemented, perhaps, something like this:

class Store {
  getSomeData(id) {
    if (!this.cache[id]) {
      MyResurceDAO.get(id).then(this.updateFromServer);
      this.cache[id] = LOADING_TOKEN;
      // LOADING_TOKEN is a unique value of some kind
      // that the component can use to know that the
      // value is not yet available.
    }

    return this.cache[id];
  }

  updateFromServer(response) {
    fluxDispatcher.dispatch({
      type: "DATA_FROM_SERVER",
      payload: {id: response.id, data: response}
    });
  }

  // this handles the "DATA_FROM_SERVER" action
  handleDataFromServer(action) {
    this.cache[action.payload.id] = action.payload.data;
    this.emit("change"); // or whatever you do to re-render your app
  }
}