[Feature Request] Option for action constants created by createSlice to follow the SCREAMING SNAKE CASE

REQUEST:

If feasible, I would request an option whereby createSlice automatically generates uppercase action constants from the cameCase reducer names defined in the slice. Additionally, the “actions” property of the slice returned, instead of looking like this:

mySlice.actions = { myAction1, myAction2, myAction3 };

would look like this:

mySlice.actions = {
    MY_ACTION_1: 'MY_ACTION_1',
    MY_ACTION_2: 'MY_ACTION_2',
    MY_ACTION_3: 'MY_ACTION_3',
}

REASON FOR REQUEST:

The documentation for createSlice states:

The original Redux docs and examples generally used a “SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE” convention for defining action types… The downside is that the uppercase strings can be hard to read… Redux Toolkit’s createSlice function currently generates action types that look like “domain/action”, such as “todos/addTodo”. Going forward, we suggest using the “domain/action” convention for readability.

I disagree. I strongly prefer my snakes screaming over quiet and camel-like, precisely because I find it easier to read. It is much easier to distinguish particular actions from others in the right side of Redux Devtools, and I find I can instantly spot where an action is being called in a thunk, in the UI code, or in a library like redux-saga, because uppercase is only used in UI code, for the most part, to define display text.

Maybe the other reason I find it so easy to distinguish actions in all caps is it forces each action constant to form a distinct pattern of alternating solid and empty spaces. Hopefully the next few lines will illustrate.

More concentration to distinguish:

I am writing stuff all around so setAllGophersRabid will blend in.
I am writing stuff all around so retrieveMyHamburgers will blend in.

Less Concentration to distinguish:

I am writing stuff all around so SET_ALL_GOPHERS_RABID  will blend in.
I am writing stuff all around so RETRIEVE_MY_HAMBURGERS  will blend in.

The shape helps because more distinct

I am writing stuff all around so ▓▓_▓▓_▓▓▓▓▓▓▓_▓▓▓▓  will blend in.
I am writing stuff all around so ▓▓▓▓▓▓_▓▓_▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓  will blend in.

[jehillert]

I had a few more months after filing this issue to work with redux-toolkit on a personal project before starting a new job that uses a different state management library, both experiences coming after a year on a big sloppy-in-a-good-way enterprise project that lasted a year and relied heavily on basic redux. All I can say, is for a library I dreaded three years ago when I switched careers, it is now the neatest thing I’ve come across. A puzzle piece fits perfectly into one puzzle, that’s not too amazing. A puzzle piece fits into 5 million different puzzles perfectly, and half of those puzzles sorta naturally self-organize around that one piece, that’s quite another…

[markerikson]

Heh, yeah. I think I remember Dan once saying that he “didn’t think everyone would just copy the stuff he was showing in the docs” or something like that. Which, tbh, is kind of silly - the whole point of examples in docs is to give people patterns they can follow.

There were perfectly good reasons for using const ADD_TODO = "ADD_TODO", of course. SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE is a standard idiom across languages for writing constant values, and it avoided writing the same string in different places and getting it wrong. Mostly.

But as Lenz said, today action types are mostly an implementation detail, and the only time you should really be seeing them is in the DevTools.