Dynamically Manage State with Crystalize.js: A Comprehensive Guide
In modern app development, state management is a crucial concept, especially for single-page applications. It involves controlling and monitoring actions, user inputs, and responses from a server. While popular libraries like Redux and MobX provide a way to access data globally without passing props around components and pages, they lack the ability to undo or redo actions in an application or navigate to a particular point in a series of actions. This is where Crystalize.js comes in – a library designed to manage state dynamically.
What is Crystalize.js?
Crystalize.js captures actions and data as “shards” and stores them in a state known as a “crystal.” This approach enables features like undo and redo functionality in an application. The library introduces new terms such as crystalizer, crystal, shards, and base, along with a set of APIs including take, leave, with, focus, and more.
Building a Photo Editing App with Crystalize.js
To demonstrate the power of Crystalize.js, we’ll build a photo editing web app with redo, undo, and download functionalities. We’ll explore the similarities and differences it shares with Redux.
Setting Up a React Application with Crystalize.js
We’ll create a new React app using the Next.js CLI and install the Crystalize.js library. We’ll also set up a Context API to share the context with the Provider.
Initializing Crystalize.js
We’ll import the library and call the Crystalizer class with the appropriate arguments. The initialData object will contain id and style keys.
Setting Up States
We’ll define an imageRef and four states: imageUrl, crystalizer, modifier, and pointer. We’ll also set up a fifth state to extract the content of the crystalizer in the context provider.
Setting Up Helper Functions
We’ll create callback functions for uploading images, undoing actions, redoing actions, and downloading the edited image.
Setting Up the ImageStyle Memo
We’ll set up the imageStyle memo, which computes and returns an object that matches the initialData.
Styling the App and Creating UI Components
We’ll create UI components for the image uploader, tool list item, edit tool list, sidebar, canvas, download button, undo button, redo button, text field, range input field, and select field.
Exploring Additional Crystalize.js Methods
We’ll discuss two other Crystalize.js methods:.focus and.without. The.focus method gets specific shards in the crystal and modifies them, while the.without method removes shards from the crystal.
Additional Options for the Crystalizer
We’ll explore additional options that can be passed to the Crystalizer, including sort, map, tsKey, and keep.
Crystalize.js vs. Redux: Comparison Table
We’ll summarize the similarities and differences between Crystalize.js and Redux in a comparison table.
By the end of this tutorial, we’ll have a working React application that uses Crystalize.js to provide photo editing capabilities, undo and redo actions, and the ability to download the edited image.