Dispatch action or action creator?

A little confused so please excuse my ignorance.

In the readme I see an example _dispatching the action_:

class UserComponent extends React.Component {
  ...
  onSomeButtonClicked() {
    const { userId, dispatch } = this.props
    dispatch({type: 'USER_FETCH_REQUESTED', payload: {userId}})
  }
  ...
}

In an example I see _dispatching of the action creator_?

import { selectReddit, invalidateReddit } from '../actions'

class App extends Component {
  ...
  handleChange(nextReddit) {
    this.props.dispatch(selectReddit(nextReddit))
  }
  ...
}

Any reason for the variation? Don’t both approaches do the same thing?

I thought one of the benefits of sagas was the fact you no longer needed to do as much importing (hence the first example).

Trying to standardize an approach before I convert over to sagas.

[slorber]

@DarrylD thanks 😃

I think we allow to dispatch an action creator because people might want to keep using thunks with redux-saga. I think thunks are not needed anymore with redux-saga, but one might want to migrate progressively to sagas and keep both during the migration.

In this example as the selectReddit is not a thunk I don’t see much interest, except the ability to have an action builder, on which you can easily add assertions, and eventually a typesystem like typescript or flow. I’d recommend to keep the usage of actionCreators just for that as it can help maintainability.

Wether you are in a saga, or in a componnt, using an actionCreator has these advantages:

this.props.dispatch(selectReddit(nextReddit))

// or 

yield put(selectReddit(nextReddit))

[DarrylD]

Interesting. I’m not using thunks at the moment but, I think I’ll play around some some options. I have to say, at this moment, AC’s seems pretty redundant for my use case. Maybe maintainability would be a factor but, it seems like the additional boilerplate/overhead offsets a bit.

Also gonna implement ducks, that should also help a bit.