Actions

Overview

Actions are functions, their job is to perform a task. The key difference between a normal function and an Action is that once an action is completed it returns a list of mutations. Then these mutations are sent to their respective stores which may or may not cause change in the state.

Action do the How part of obtaining the data, it can be from a database, an api call, a file or anything. Once the data is obtained they are converted to mutations.

Therefore, in general we call Action causes changes but it's important to understand that Actions play a bigger role than just mutating state.

ActionRef

ActionRef or ActionReference is where you define your actions but do not create it. It's only a refernce to your action.

final setRef = ActionRef<CounterParam, void>(
  body: (payload) async {
    await Future.delayed(Duration(milliseconds: payload.seconds));
  },
  mutations: (result, payload) =>
      [Mutation(payload.store, CountMutation(payload.count))],
);

setRef above is refernce we can obtain it anywhere. Generally it's better to define all your action refernce in a class as static values.

Whenever we want to create an Action we will call the action reference

//CounterParam is the required payload here
final action = setRef(CounterParam());

But the actions still hasn't been executed, the Dispatcher knows that we have created an action but we haven't requested the dispatcher to execute it.

If we want to execute our action we will call the run()

action.run()