Is it a good practice to call action within another action (in flux)

I have an action as follows:

SomeActions.doAction1(){
   //..dispatch event "started"...
   //...do some process....
   FewActions.doAnotherAction(); //CAN WE DO THIS
   //...do something more....
   //..dispatch event "completed"..
}

While the above works with no problems, just wondering, if it is valid according to flux pattern/standard or is there a better way.

Also, I guess calling Actions from Stores are a bad idea. Correct me if I am wrong.

Solution

Yes, calling an Action within another Action is a bad practice. Actions should be atomic; all changes in the Stores should be in response to a single action. They should describe one thing that happened in the real world: the user clicked on a button, the server responded with data, the screen refreshed, etc.

Most people get confused by Actions when they are thinking about them as imperative instructions (first do A, then do B) instead of descriptions of what happened and the starting point for reactive processes.

This is why I recommend to people that they name their Action types in the past tense: BUTTON_CLICKED. This reminds the programmer of the fundamentally externally-driven, descriptive nature of Actions.

Actions are like a newspaper that gets delivered to all the stores, describing what happened.

Calling Actions from Stores is almost always the wrong thing to do. I can only think of one exception: when the Store responds to the first Action by starting up an asynchronous process. When the async process completes, you want to fire off a second Action. This is the case with a XHR call to the server. But the better way is to put the XHR handling code into a Utils module. The store can then respond to the first Action by calling a method in the Utils module, and then the Utils module has the code to call the second Action when the server response comes back.