Glossary

Glossary of basic terms in effector

Event#

Event is a function you can subscribe to. It can be an intention to change the store, indication of something happening in the application, a command to be executed, aggregated analytics trigger and so on.

Event in api documentation

Store#

Store is an object that holds state. There can be multiple stores.

Store in api documentation

Effect#

Effect is a container for (possibly async) side effects. It exposes special events and stores, such as pending, done, fail, finally, etc...

It can be safely used in place of the original async function.

It returns promise with result of a function call

The only requirement for the function:

Must have zero or one argument

Effect in api documentation

Domain#

Domain is a namespace for your events, stores and effects.

Domains are notified when events, stores, effects, or nested domains are created via onCreateEvent, onCreateStore, onCreateEffect, onCreateDomain methods.

It is useful for logging or other side effects.

Domain in api documentation

Unit#

Data type used to describe business logic of applications. Most of the effector methods deal with unit processing. There are four units types: store, event, effect and domain

Common unit#

Common units can be used to trigger updates of other units. There are three common unit types: store, event and effect. When a method accepts units, it means that it accepts events, effects, and stores as a source of reactive updates

Purity#

Most of functions in api must not call other events or effects: it's easier to reason about application's data flow when imperative triggers are grouped inside watchers and effect handlers rather than spread across entire business logic.

Correct, imperative:

import {createStore, createEvent} from 'effector'

const login = createStore('guest')

const loginSize = login.map(login => login.length)

const submitLoginSize = createEvent()

loginSize.watch(size => {
  submitLoginSize(size)
})

Try it

store.map in docs

store.watch in docs

Correct, declarative:

import {createStore, createEvent, forward} from 'effector'

const login = createStore('guest')

const loginSize = login.map(login => login.length)

const submitLoginSize = createEvent()

forward({
  from: loginSize,
  to: submitLoginSize,
})

Try it

forward in docs

Incorrect:

import {createStore, createEvent, forward} from 'effector'

const submitLoginSize = createEvent()

const login = createStore('guest')
const loginSize = login.map(login => {
  // no! use forward or watch instead
  submitLoginSize(login.length)
  return login.length
})

Reducer#

type StoreReducer<State, E> = (state: State, payload: E) => State | void
type EventOrEffectReducer<T, E> = (state: T, payload: E) => T

Reducer calculates a new state given the previous state and an event's payload. For stores, if reducer returns undefined or the same state (===), then there will be no update for a given store.

Watcher#

type Watcher<T> = (update: T) => any

Watcher is used for side effects. Accepted by event.watch, store.watch and domain.onCreate* hooks. Return value of a watcher is ignored.

Subscription#

type Subscription = {
  (): void
  unsubscribe(): void
}

Function, returned by forward, event.watch, store.watch and some others methods. Used for cancelling a subscription. After first call, subscription will do nothing

Managing subscriptions manually distracts from business logic improvements

Effector provides a wide range of features to minimize the need to remove subscriptions. This sets it apart from most other reactive libraries