STORE

The store is a global state manager that dispatches actions your state containers listen to and provides a way to select data slices out from the global state.

Creating actions

An action example in animal.actions.ts.

export class AddAnimal {
  static readonly type = '[Zoo] Add Animal';

  constructor(public name: string) {}
}

Dispatching actions

To dispatch actions, you need to inject the Store service into your component/service and invoke the dispatch function with an action or an array of actions you wish to trigger.

import { Store } from '@ngxs/store';
import { AddAnimal } from './animal.actions';

@Component({ ... })
export class ZooComponent {
  constructor(private store: Store) {}

  addAnimal(name: string) {
    this.store.dispatch(new AddAnimal(name));
  }
}

You can also dispatch multiple actions at the same time by passing an array of actions like:

this.store.dispatch([new AddAnimal('Panda'), new AddAnimal('Zebra')]);

Let's say after the action executes you want to clear the form. Our dispatch function actually returns an Observable, so we can subscribe to it and reset the form after it was successful.

import { Store } from '@ngxs/store';
import { AddAnimal } from './animal.actions';

@Component({ ... })
export class ZooComponent {
  constructor(private store: Store) {}

  addAnimal(name: string) {
    this.store.dispatch(new AddAnimal(name)).subscribe(() => this.form.reset());
  }
}

The Observable that a dispatch returns has a void type, this is because there can be multiple states that listen to the same @Action, therefore it's not realistically possible to return the state from these actions since we don't know the form of them.

If you need to get the state after this, simply use selectSignal in the chain like:

import { Store } from '@ngxs/store';
import { Observable } from 'rxjs';
import { withLatestFrom } from 'rxjs';

import { AnimalState } from './animal.state';
import { AddAnimal } from './animal.actions';

@Component({ ... })
export class ZooComponent {
  animals = this.store.selectSignal(AnimalState.getAnimals);

  constructor(private store: Store) {}

  addAnimal(name: string) {
    this.store.dispatch(new AddAnimal(name)).subscribe(() => {
      console.log(this.animals());
      // do something with animals
      this.form.reset();
    });
  }
}

dispatch Utility

NGXS offers a utility function named dispatch, which takes an action as a parameter and returns a function. This function can then be called with parameters for the action constructor. When this function is called, the action is created and is dispatched immediately:

import { dispatch } from '@ngxs/store';

// An action declared somewhere in your app
class Greet {
  static readonly type = 'Greet';

  constructor(public greeting: string) {}
}

// Then, in your component
export class MyComponent {
  greet = dispatch(Greet);

  constructor() {
    // the `this.greet` function has the same signature as the action's constructor!
    this.greet('Hello world!');
  }
}

Snapshots

You can get a snapshot of the state by calling store.snapshot(). This will return the entire value of the store for that point in time.

Selecting State

See the select page for details on how to use the store to select data.

Reset

In certain situations you need the ability to reset the state in its entirety without triggering any actions or life-cycle hooks. One example of this would be redux devtools plugin when we are doing time travel. Another example would be when we are unit testing and need the state to be a specific value for isolated testing.

store.reset(myNewStateObject) will reset the entire state to the passed argument without firing any actions or life-cycle events.

Warning: Using this can cause unintended side effects if improperly used and should be used with caution!