Deleting Resources

Redux Resource provides four action types for deleting resources. They are as follows:

"DELETE_RESOURCES_PENDING"
"DELETE_RESOURCES_FAILED"
"DELETE_RESOURCES_SUCCEEDED"
"DELETE_RESOURCES_NULL"

Each request will always begin with an action with type DELETE_RESOURCES_PENDING. Then, one of the other three action types will be used to represent the resolution of that request. Use the requests in the following way:

• DELETE_RESOURCES_FAILED: Use this if the request fails for any reason. This could be network errors, or any HTTP Status Code greater than 400.
• DELETE_RESOURCES_NULL: Use this is the request is aborted.
• DELETE_RESOURCES_SUCCEEDED: Use this when the request was successful.

Using Named Requests

Because you usually know the ID of the resources that you're deleting, you typically don't need to use named requests for delete operations. The metadata for the delete request can just be stored on the resource metadata directly.

Sometimes, you might do a bulk delete of, say, 5 resources. You're more than welcome to just choose one of those 5 resources, and use its metadata to track the delete for the other 4 resources. However, if this doesn't sound like a good system to you, then you can also use a named request to track that bulk action.

Successful Deletes

When an action of type DELETE_RESOURCES_SUCCEEDED is dispatched, any resources included in the action will be removed from the resources array of your state tree. They will also be removed from the ID array of any list.

The meta for each of the resources will be reset to the default metadata, except for deleteStatus, which will be set to "SUCCEEDED".

Note: Keep in mind that this means that a resource's metadata will never completely go away with the built-in reducers. If we handled this cleanup for you, then you would never get the successful status for delete requests!

For most applications, this won't be a problem, and you can just leave the metadata in your state tree. If your application involves deleting many, many resources, you may want to write a plugin to clear out old, unused metadata.

Redux Resource XHR

Redux Resource XHR provides an action creator that simplifies making CRUD requests. If you'd like to build your own, then that's fine, too. The example below may help.

Example Action Creator

This example shows an action creator to delete a single book. It uses the redux-thunk middleware and the library xhr for making requests.

import { actionTypes } from 'redux-resource';
import xhr from 'xhr';

export default function deleteBook(bookId) {
  return function(dispatch) {
    dispatch({
      type: actionTypes.DELETE_RESOURCES_PENDING,
      resourceName: 'books',
      resources: [bookId]
    });

    const req = xhr.del(
      `/books/${bookId}`,
      (err, res, body) => {
        if (req.aborted) {
          dispatch({
            type: actionTypes.DELETE_RESOURCES_NULL,
            resourceName: 'books',
            resources: [bookId]
          });
        } else if (err || res.statusCode >= 400) {
          dispatch({
            type: actionTypes.DELETE_RESOURCES_FAILED,
            resourceName: 'books',
            resources: [bookId]
          });
        } else {
          dispatch({
            type: actionTypes.DELETE_RESOURCES_SUCCEEDED,
            resourceName: 'books',
            resources: [bookId]
          });
        }
      }
    );

    return req;
  }
}