Redux State Resets On Window Reload (Client Side)

Question

I have very large and complicated objects like userInfo, chatInfo, and etc as in objects & arrays with very large and nested information. The thing is in my react app every time I refresh my page the redux state gets reset and I have to call all those API's again.

I did some research on this topic. I checked Dan Abramov's egghead tutorial on redux. What he does is maintain the redux state in localStorage of the browser and updated the localStorage after every 100 or 500 ms. I feel as if this is a code smell.

Continuously watching the localStorage state and updating it, wouldn't it effect the performance of the browser. I mean wasn't this on of the reasons Angular 1 failed because it continuously kept on watching state variables and after a while if the site was kept live in the browser it just slowed down. Because our script continuously kept on checking the state of the variables. i feel as if we are doing the same thing here.

If maintaining the redux state in localStorage is the right approach can someone tell me why so? And if not is there a better approach?

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This is not a duplicate of How can I persist redux state tree on refresh? because I am asking for advice whether persisting state in local storage is a code smell or not

Answer 1

I think using localStorage is your best option here, since it seems the data you are storing there is needed on the client. If the data is not changing, you shouldn't need to repeatedly query, or watch, the localStorage.

Another thing you can do is wrap a closure around your localStorage, so that you are not always hitting disk when retrieving your "large" data. Every browser implements localStorage differently, so there are no guarantees on consistent behaviour or I/O performance.

This also adds a simple layer of abstraction which hides the implementation, and controls everything related to your user data in one place.

Here is a simple example of user profile data closure:

// UserProfile.js
var UserProfile = (function() {
  var userData = {};

  var getUserData = function() {
    if (!userData) { 
      userData = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem("userData"));
    }
    return userData;
  };

  var setUserData = function(userData) {
    localStorage.setItem("userData", JSON.stringify(userData));
    userData = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem("userData"));
  };

  return {
    getUserData: getUserData,
    setUserData: setUserData
  }
})();

export default UserProfile;

Set the user data object: This will overwrite the localStorage, and set the local variable inside the closure.

import UserProfile from '/UserProfile';
UserProfile.setUserData(newUserData);

Get the user data object: This will get the data from the local variable inside the closure, or else go get it from localStorage if it is not set.

import UserProfile from '/UserProfile';
var userData = UserProfile.getUserData();

The idea here is to load data into memory, from localStorage, the first time, when your app loads, or on the first API call. Until such a time when the user profile data changes, (i.e. a user updates their profile, for example), then you would query the API again, and update the data again via the UserProfile.setUserData(..) call.