Dispatching further actions when handling actions

Question

I have a scenario where I feel like I need to dispatch an action in response to another action, and I don\'t know the best way to sort it out.

An action is dispatched in

Answer 1

Usually, the solution to this problem is to to back up and look at the original action, and to waitFor the value that you are trying to send in the second action, if a derived value is required.

So in this case you would respond only to 'auth' in both the UserStore and the RouteStore.

Answer 2

You should look back how you are trying to create this flow.

You say that you need to create an action in response to another action, right? So, let's name this the "ActionForwarderStore".

We end up with a flow like this:

AuthAction --> Dispatcher --+--> UserStore
                            |
                            +--> ActionForwarderStore --+
                                                        |
           +--------------------------------------------+
           |
           +-> Dispatcher -----> RouteStore

You see that you still have someone that understands that a AuthAction should end up changing a route? This is the ActionForwarderStore. As Flux suggests that every Store listens to every Action, this knowledge of the AuthAction ending up in a route change can go straight into RouteStore. Like this:

AuthAction --> Dispatcher --+--> UserStore
                            |
                            +--> RouteStore

Remember that Flux was "created" in order to avoid the unpredictability of MVC. If you keep all your route changes into RouteStore, you just need to look at this Store code to understand what Actions will cause a route change. If you go in the way of creating an action in response to another action, you will only know that NavigateAction changes routes, and you will need to look at the other Stores to check which ones are triggering this Action in response to others.

This is what Flux names as "unidirectional flow". It's easy to catch problems this way because this is the only flow allowed. If you click a button and it changes the route, you can know for sure that the action that the click dispatched is causing the route change, there are no cascading actions.