Actions are one of the most important parts of a react/redux application. They're also one of the simplest: plain objects acting like messages (signals) telling what's going on in your application.

{
  type: 'MY_ACTION',
  payload: 'foo'
}

So the action object is very simple, it just needs a unique identifier (the type field). By convention, the type should be an uppercase string. You want to be sure that you don't misspell the action type when dispatching an action. The redux documentation encourages you to make a function, called the action creator, that always returns the same action type.

const myAction = payload => ({
  type: 'MY_ACTION',
  payload
})

myAction('foo');

Now you have the action creator, but you also need the action type in the reducer to generate the new state. So you should use a constant to be sure you are using the same action type in both the action creator and the reducer function.

export const MY_ACTION = 'MY_ACTION';

function myReducer(state = initialState, action) {
  switch (action.type) {
    case MY_ACTION:
      return 'My new state'
    default:
      return state
  }
}

This sounds like an Andre Staltz What The Flux joke but it actually makes sense. In real world applications, you have a lot of related actions in async operations (e.g. data fetch). You'll end up with a lot of costants imported (FETCH_CLIENTS , FETCH_CLIENTS_START, FETCH_CLIENTS_SUCCESS, FETCH_CLIENTS_FAILURE, etc), and of course, the corresponding action creators. This module is an Action Creator Creator (lol) that tries to keep the related actions and constants together in a single object.

There are many diferents ways to do a redux application. Regardless this module is just about the actions. I use it in a redux application context with this assumptions:

• Actions are simple signals.
• Reducer functions must express the state transformation, not the actionCreator.
• Action creator must be as pure as the reducer.
• Side effects are in redux sagas.

In your actions file

import makeActionCreator from 'make-action-creator';

export const showModalForm = makeActionCreator('show_modal_form');

In your component file

import showModalForm from './actions';

dispatch(showModalForm(data));

/*
{
	type: 'SHOW_MODAL_FORM',
	payload: data
}
*/

In your reducer file

import showModalForm from './actions';

function myReducer(state = initialState, action) {
  switch (action.type) {
    case showModalForm.type:
      return 'My new state'
    default:
      return state
  }
}

In your actions file

import makeActionCreator from 'make-action-creator';

export const deleteUser = makeActionCreator('delete_user');

In your component file

import deleteUser from './actions';

dispatch(deleteUser(userId));

/*
{
  type: 'DELETE_USER',
  payload: userId
}
*/

In your sagas file :)

import deleteUser from './actions';

function * deleteUserWorker (action) {
  yield put(deleteUser.start(action.payload)); // dispatch 'DELETE_USER_START'

  const { user, error } = yield call(userApi.delete, action.payload);

  if (error) {
    return yield put(deleteUser.failure(error)); // dispatch 'DELETE_USER_FAILURE'
  }

  yield put(deleteUser.success(user)); // dispatch 'DELETE_USER_SUCCESS'
}

export function * deleteUserWatcher () {
  yield takeEvery(deleteUser.type, deleteUserWorker); // watch 'DELETE_USER'
}

In your reducer file

import deleteUser from './actions';

function myReducer(state = initialState, action) {
  switch (action.type) {
    case deleteUser.START:
      return 'Deleting user...';
    case deleteUser.FAILURE:
      return 'doh!'
    case deleteUser.SUCCESS:
      return 'Done!'
    default:
      return state
  }
}

I kinda like this module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-redux-spinner.

As async flow use to come with showing some loader in the page, if you are using this module and like the async related actions to include the flags to start and finish the react-redux-spinner, just add this to the actionCreator creation step:

const myAction = makeActionCreator('my_action', { rrSpinner: true });

By default you just pass one paremeter to the action creator and that will be the action payload. If you want to add extra data, you may provide a second argument which must be an object.

const myAction = makeActionCreator('my_action', { rrSpinner: true });

myAction('foo', {
  more: data
})

/*
{
  type: 'MY_ACTION',
  payload: 'foo',
  more: data
}
*/