@automattic/tree-select
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2.0.0 • Public • Published

Tree select

This module exports a function which creates a cached state selector for use with the Redux global application state. It is a good idea to use this function over plain selectors whenever either the computation over state or React's rerenders are expensive. It is called treeSelect because it internally uses a tree of dependencies to allow the gc to free memory without explicitly clearing the cache.

Usage

treeSelect accepts the following arguments:

  • getDependents: A function which maps over state and returns all of the relevant parts of state the selector needs. You should be creating an array whose elements are all return values of other selectors -- no computations allowed here.
  • selector: A function which takes in the same args as getDependents with one catch. Instead of being passed state as its first arg, it is given the results of getDependents. This forces you to declare all of your state-dependencies.

For example, imagine that our state contains post objects, each of which are assigned to a particular site. Retrieving an array of posts for a specific site would require us to filter over all of the known posts. While this would normally trigger a re-render in React, we can use treeSelect to create a cached version of the selector which can return a referentially equal object:

const getDependents = ( state ) => [ state.posts ];
const selector = ( [ posts ], siteId ) => filter( posts, { siteId } );

const getSitePosts = treeSelect( selector, getDependents );

In using the selector, we pass in the arguments for selector. In this case, we'll need to pass a state object and siteId.

const sitePosts = getSitePosts( state, siteId );

This result would only be calculated once, so long as state.posts remains the same.

FAQ

What is a cached selector?

We strive to keep redundant data out of our Redux state tree, but this can come at the cost of performance if our selectors are time-consuming in how they evaluate and filter over the state.

A cached selector is to redux state what a materialized view is to a database table. It is a selector that caches results as long as its dependent parts of state have not changed.

How does the cached selector know when to recalculate its result?

Because Redux discourages us from mutating objects within state directly, we only need to verify that a piece of state is no longer referentially equal to its previous state (as opposed to a deep equality check).

When creating a treeSelect selector, you give it a function getDependents that returns an array of dependents. As an example, lets say you have a function that depends on both a particular site and its comments like so:

const getDependents = ( state, siteId ) => [ state.comments[ siteId ], state.sites[ siteId ] ];
const selector = ( [ comments, site ], siteId ) =>
	`Site ${ site.title } has ${ comments.length } comments`;

const cachedSelector = treeSelect( selector, getDependents );

internally, the selector will store a dependency tree of dependents where the last node is a map keyed by a run of ...args.join(). The tree would look like:

                    comments
                       +
                       |
            +--------------------+
            |                    |
            v                    v
          site1                site2
            +                    +
      +------                   ...
      v
  "siteId1"
      +
      |
      v
    "Site...."

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