@gluedigital/network-action

Network Action

A simple wrapper around Fetch API, ironing out some of its kirks, and adding Redux action dispatching.

Note: this is a ES6-only module, and must be used in a ES6 environment, or transpiled as needed.

Usage demo

import networkAction from '@gluedigital/network-action'

export const someApiAction = (username, password) => networkAction({
  action: 'login',
  url: 'http://localhost:3000/oauth/token'
  body: { username, password }
})

Features

These are the main differences from using raw fetch:

• A loading action will be dispatched when starting the request, and a success/error one when finished.
• Automatic handling of posting JSON body, and defaults to parsing response as JSON.
• If you have a 'user' reducer with a 'access_token' key, it will be added to each request.
• When used with Universal Scripts on the server, it will passthrough any received cookies.

Options

The following options can be used:

Key	Type	Meaning
url	string	The absolute url that we want to fetch.
baseUrl	string	A prefix that will be added to the url before using it. Useful for default values.
action	string	Redux action type prefix. If action is 'foo', we will dispatch 'foo/loading' and one of 'foo/success' or 'foo/error'.
body	any	The body of the HTTP request. Can be a FormData, string, or JSON object.
token	string	An access_token to override the one retrieved from the store.
noReject	bool	On error responses, don't reject the promise (to prevent unhandled rejections).
processBody	func	Function to process the body before adding it to the request.
processRequest	func	Function to process the request before sending it.
processResponse	func	Function to process the response before handling it and dispatching the success action. It can reject it too by throwing.
meta	any	Any extra info you want to associate to this request. Will be dispatched on the loading/success/error actions.
fetchOptions	object	Extra raw options to pass to fetch().

Defaults

If you want to make multiple calls with some common settings, like when creating actions related with the same server, you can use this pattern:

import networkAction from '@gluedigital/network-action'

const fooNetworkAction = networkAction.withDefaults({
  baseUrl: 'https://example.com/foo'
  fetchOpts: { credentials: 'include' }
})

export const someFooApiAction = (username, password) => fooNetworkAction({
  action: 'login',
  url: '/oauth/token'
  body: { username, password }
})

The withDefaults helper adds the options passed to it as defaults for the next calls, and takes care to mix the fetchOpts properly.

Reducer

We provide a ready-made reducer for the actions dispatched by this library. You can use it like this:

import networkAction from '@gluedigital/network-action'

const myReducer = combineReducers({
  loadFoo: networkAction.reducer('loadFoo'),
  saveBar: networkAction.reducer('saveBar')
})

Additionally, networkAction.reducer may take a list of actions that will share the same state key (and, therefore, overwrite its previous value when one of the actions is dispatched).

import networkAction from '@gluedigital/network-action'

const myReducer = combineReducers({
  sharedFooBar: networkAction.reducer(['loadFoo', 'saveBar' ])
})

The stored value will be:

// If still loading:
{ isLoading: true }
// On success:
{ isSuccess: true, value: action.payload }
// On error:
{ isError: true, error: action.payload }

In case you want to store certain extra info after dispatching the action, you could do it by adding the meta object containing the info, just like in the example below:

import networkAction from '@gluedigital/network-action'

export const getImageById = (imageId) => networkAction({
  action: 'getImageById',
  url: 'http://localhost:3000/images',
  body: { imageId },
  meta: { imageId }
})

const fooApiActionReducer = combineReducers({
  image: networkAction.reducer('getImageById'),
})

The stored value would include the meta field with the original info provided to the action:

// If still loading:
{ isLoading: true, meta: { imageId: imageId } }
// On success:
{ isSuccess: true, value: action.payload, meta: { imageId: imageId } }
// On error:
{ isError: true, error: action.payload, meta: { imageId: imageId} }

There is another variant available at networkAction.keyedReducer which saves a response similar to the previous one, but for each different value of the key attribute. The key can be either an attribute name that matches a field on the meta object, or a function which returns a key derived from the whole action.

const myReducer = networkAction.keyedReducer('getTask', 'id')

const getTask = id => networkAction({
  action: 'getTask',
  url: 'http://localhost:3000/tasks/' + id,
  meta: { id }
}))

// Usage demo:
await dispatch(getTask(1))
await dispatch(getTask(2))
console.log(getState())
// {
//   1: { isSuccess: true, value: ... },
//   2: { isError: true, error: ... },
// }