storing normalized data with redux

Question

I would like my reducers to populate a root object in the state, independently from the slice of state they operate on.

I have found many pages explaining how wonderful is normalizr, but no one is explaining where and how to store this normalized data.

Questions are:

1. am I trying to do something unusual and wrong?

2. how can I modify state in the root state object, since reducers only operate on a slice of the data.

so videos reducer:

const videos = (state, action) => {
  switch (action.type) {  
    case 'LOAD_VIDEOS': {
      return ....
    }
  }
}

should populate not only state.videos (with a array of video id), but also state.database.videos (and other keys as well if video contains other entities) with normalized data.

Answer 1

If your reducer needs to work on more than a slice of state, give it the whole state.

If you're using combineReducers(), you can wrap it so you keep the advantages of combining reducers and you can still have a reducer that works on the full state:

function somePartOfState(state, action) {
  // ...
}
function otherPartOfState(state, action) {
  // ...
}
function fullState(state, action) {
  // ...
}

const combined = combineReducers({
  somePartOfState,
  otherPartOfState
});

export function rootReducer(state, action) {
  // call the combined reducers, 
  // then pass the resulting state to the fullState reducer
  return fullState(combined(state, action), action);
}