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Reducing Redux Action Import Hell with Namespaces in ES6

February 01, 2018 -

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Importing a lot of actions can be messy in a larger Redux app. Here are some tips to do it more clean and organized way.

a neat way of avoiding import hell and syntax noise

Boilerplate

List all necessary actions as named imports. This method can be really difficult to maintain.

import {
  sendMessages,
  deleteMessage,
  markAsRead,
} from './messageActions'
import {
  openChat,
  closeChat,
} from './chatActions'
// component code comes here
const mapDispatchToProps = dispatch => bindActionCreators(
  {
    sendMessages,
    deleteMessage,
    markAsRead,
    openChat,
    closeChat,
  },
  dispatch,
)
// connect(...)

To see how connect() works, see: 5 Ways to Connect Redux Actions

Import All Actions as Namespaces

We don’t need to list all the actions so this version is much shorter. Newly created actions are injected into the component’s props implicitly.

import * as messageActions from './messageActions'
import * as chatActions from './chatActions'
// component code comes here
const mapDispatchToProps = dispatch => bindActionCreators(
  {...messageActions, ...chatActions},
  dispatch,
)
// connect(...)

or just:

import * as messageActions from './messageActions'
import * as chatActions from './chatActions'
// component code comes here
const mapDispatchToProps = {...messageActions, ...chatActions}
// connect(...)

Happy coding!