Fluxor is a Flux implementation for Blazor in the vein of Redux. It is a state management system designed for larger software systems that encourages immutability of state, pure functions and clean separation of code. Given my fairly basic understanding of the Flux pattern I thought it would be valuable to document what it is at a high level and what’s required when using Fluxor to implement the various concepts.

Note that this is not a tutorial on Flux or Fluxor, both of those are covered quite nicely in the Fluxor Documentation already. This is my attempt to distill the two into a form that I at least will find useful to refer to. For more detailed implementation information, refer to the aforementioned tutorials.

Flux Concepts

  • Dispatcher - responsible for directing actions and updating state.
  • State - a subsection of the store, per domain. Immutable.
    • State classes/records in Fluxor have the [FeatureState] attribute.
  • Action - Classes that are created when an action is to be performed, consumed by Effects and Reducers. May be empty but typically contain the results of an action.
  • Reducer - triggered by an action, creates a new state usually based on the previous state and sometimes with the results of the action.
    • Reducer methods are typically static to encourage pure functions, and have the [ReducerMethod] attribute in Fluxor.
  • Effect - triggered by an action, typically performs an activity such as a service request and then could trigger another action. Does not affect state.
    • Effect methods can be static but will need to be part of a class instance if they depend on services which will be injected. Effect methods have the [EffectMethod] attribute in Fluxor.
  • ActionSubscriber - a service (IActionSubscriber) that intercepts actions independent of the store.
  • Blazor components and pages should inherit Fluxor.Blazor.Web.Components.FluxorComponent.
    • If unable to inherit from that class, subcribe to the StateChanged event and execute InvokeAsync(StateHasChanged). Don’t forget to unsubscribe!

In Practice

As an example, the CLI tutorial given on Fluxor’s docs does the following:

  • Prompts the user to select an action
  • User requests a weather update
    • An action is created to fetch the weather
      • The action is intercepted by a reducer which updates the state, emptying the weather list and sets Loading to true
      • The action is also intercepted by an effect which makes an API call to get the weather
        • When complete, the effect raises another action with the results
          • The action is intercepted by another reducer which updates the state with the results and sets Loading to false

I’ve taken note of this as I particularly like the way the initial action is used to update the state by way of a reducer while also triggering the effect to load the data.