How & when to best modularise Components with & without Redux?

Question

Say I want to create a little editor for my software that helps me organise people in my company. I will use React & Redux. The editor is a React component (or maybe container?), and it shows me one person at a time. I can edit things about this person, delete fields, etc. and when I am ready I can click a button which will then give me the next person to edit.

Now, I am quite new to React still and can imagine doing this in 2 ways:

Solution 1: Decouple the editor component

Create an Editor Component, which takes an array of all the people in my company. I do have these people saved in the Redux state of my app, but the editor component will not work on my Redux state, but do all changes in its internal state first, and only once I click save will the Editor component commit these changes to my Redux state. This might be a problem, and changes could get lost if somebody doesn't save their edits.

The advantage here is that I have my Editor de-coupled from the rest of my App, and the logic of the Editor will stay in that component.

Solution 2: Connect the Editor Component to Redux

Here, I would connect my Editor component to Redux. So I would not give my component the people array, but direct access to the my Redux store via selectors (for example). I would also not have a deletePerson() function internal to my component, but pass this down as a prop into my component (and it would presumably be a Redux action). This way my component would work directly on state, which I can see as having advantages.

But taking it out of this app and reusing it somewhere else would get more and more difficult, the more complex my component becomes.

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Please remember that I am a beginner and that these two solutions are what I came up with as a response to a problem I am facing in my own application. However, I would appreciate if you could help me out here, and explain to me how I should think about problems like this. Is there maybe a third solution I am not mentioning? Or am I misunderstanding a concept? Personally, I am inclined to go with Solution No. 1, but I also know that the whole idea of Redux is to keep state in one place. What would you advise? Are there performance differences / advantages with one solution?

Answer 1

Your first solution is good but why not use a service when its provided?

You should try to mix up features of Redux React. First, separate your presentational and container components and in one of your container component pass the props directly to redux store on click,etc. Then use redux actions to access the store like deleting,etc. Provide a UI using React presentational components for data entry and pass this data to redux store. Use redux actions when you think they will be useful and not destructure your app. Go to https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/smart-and-dumb-components-7ca2f9a7c7d0 for further details on how to connect presentational and container components.