create-project-state

Installation

npm i create-project-state
# or
yarn add create-project-state

What is this?

This is an opinionated state management library for editors. It comes with some neat features:

• ✅ Fully typed
• ✅ Framework agnostic
• ✅ Built-in undo stack
• ✅ Optional React hooks
• ✅ Stateless state management
• ✅ Tiny - around 2KB, <1KB gzipped

What is "Stateless state management"?

When you use a state management method like useState, useReducer or redux, it will manage both modifying the state and holding the state. In this library, only the management (mutation) of the state is handled, and your state can be held in a separate object, in another library, in a WASM module, on a remote server or really anything accessible in JavaScript. This allows this library to be used in a lot more cases, and to make adding features such as realtime collaboration easier by allowing to decouple the state holding onto a server.

What is this for?

As the name suggests, this library has a focus on being used inside editors, IDEs, etc. The library allows managing the statein a way that makes tasks such as adding an undo stack or realtime collaboration and serializing the whole project to a file much easier:

• As you can hold your state anywhere, you can hold all of a projects state in one object and JSON.stringify it to save the project easily.
• The library forces any operation to be undoable, making an undo/redo feature easy to implement.
• If you want to add realtime collaboration to your editor, it can be done easily as it is designed to not hold the state directly, having it instead for example on a server.

Examples

Basic example

import { createProjectState } from "create-project-state";

// This is an object that holds the state
const name = { surname: "foo", name: "bar" };

// Create a project state that will manage the states of the individual components
const { createState } = createProjectState();

// Create a state manager for the name object
const NameState = createState({
  name: "nameState",
  getState: () => {
    return `${name.surname} ${name.name}`;
  },
  dispatchers: {
    setSurname: (newName: string) => {
      name.surname = newName;
    },
    setName: (newSurname: string) => {
      name.name = newSurname;
    },
  },
});

console.log(NameState.getState()); // "foo bar"
NameState.dispatchers.setSurname("foobar");
console.log(NameState.getState()); // "foobar bar"

Undo stack example

import { createProjectState } from "create-project-state";

const { undoStack, createState } = createProjectState();

let myState = "foo";
const state = createState({
  name: "myState",
  getState: () => myState,
  dispatchers: {
    setState: (newState: string) => {
      const oldState = myState;
      myState = newState;
      return () => {
        myState = oldState;
      };
    },
  },
});

const { setState } = state.dispatchers;
console.log(myState); // "foo"
setState("bar");
console.log(myState); // "bar"
undoStack.undo();
console.log(myState); // "foo"
undoStack.redo();
console.log(myState); // "bar"

React example

import { createProjectState } from "create-project-state";
import { useProjectState } from "create-project-state/react";

// This is the object that holds the state
const name = { surname: "foo", name: "bar" };

// Create a project state that will manage the states of the individual components
const { createState } = createProjectState();

// Create a state manager for the name object
const NameState = createState({
  name: "nameState",
  getState: () => {
    return `${name.surname} ${name.name}`;
  },
  dispatchers: {
    setSurname: (newName: string) => {
      name.surname = newName;
    },
    setName: (newSurname: string) => {
      name.name = newSurname;
    },
  },
});

// Now we make a React component to display and interact with the state:
const MyComponent = () => {
  // Using this hook, the component will update whenever the state is changed even though it isn't managed by react.
  const [name, { setSurname, setName }] = useProjectState(NameState);

  return (
    <>
      <p>{name}</p>
      <input onChange={(e) => setSurname(e.target.value)}>Surname</input>
      <input onChange={(e) => setName(e.target.value)}>Name</input>
    </>
  );
};