zulip-mobile uses Redux for state management and data flow. Please read the Redux docs for more information on the Redux architecture and terminology (such as actions, reducers, and stores). Briefly:
- Global app state is stored in a central place, the Redux store.
- At any time, the Redux state is a large tree of objects, all treated as immutable.
- To make changes, the whole state is replaced with a new state object. (This sounds extravagant but isn't: because everything's immutable, the old and new states can share all the sub-objects that didn't change.)
See our React/Redux architecture doc for a more detailed explanation as applied to our app.
We use selectors to extract (or select) data from the Redux store. Learn more about the concept of selectors Some selectors are memoized, using Reselect.
For the structure of our Redux state tree, see GlobalState in
src/reduxTypes.js, and follow interesting
types to their definitions: Message, User, Account and many
others have detailed jsdoc comments.
For large parts of the Redux state tree, we persist the data to the
app's local storage on the device, using
redux-persist. See storeKeys and cacheKeys in
src/boot/store.js for which parts of the
tree we persist, which we don't, and why. See also the logic handling
REHYDRATE actions in a few reducers, for additional wrinkles on the
persisted data.