Want to learn how to use NgRx without all of the boilerplate? Try out ngrx-data with our quickstart!

This quick start begins with a working angular app that has CRUD operations for heroes and villain entities. This app uses traditional services and techniques to get and save the heroes and villains. In this quick start you will add NgRx and ngrx-data to the app.

What are we doing? Great question! We're going to start with a reactive Angular app and add ngrx to it, using the ngrx-data library.

Try these steps yourself on your computer, or if you prefer follow along here on StackBlitz.

The app uses a traditional data service to get the heroes and villains. We'll be adding ngrx and ngrx-data to this application.

git clone https://github.com/johnpapa/ngrx-data-lab.git
cd ngrx-data-lab
npm install
npm i @ngrx/effects @ngrx/entity @ngrx/store @ngrx/store-devtools ngrx-data --save

We start by creating the NgRx store module for our application. Execute the following code to generate the module and import it into our root NgModule.

ng g m store/app-store --flat -m app

First we set up NgRx itself by importing the NgRx store, effects, and the dev tools. Replace the contents of app-store.module.ts with the following code.

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { StoreModule } from '@ngrx/store';
import { EffectsModule } from '@ngrx/effects';
import { StoreDevtoolsModule } from '@ngrx/store-devtools';
import { environment } from '../../environments/environment';

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    StoreModule.forRoot({}),
    EffectsModule.forRoot([]),
    environment.production ? [] : StoreDevtoolsModule.instrument()
  ]
})
export class AppStoreModule {}

NgRx allows us to create features, and our ngrx-data entity cache is a feature. Next we create the entity store for ngrx-data and tell the Angular CLI to import it into our app-store module.

ng g m store/entity-store --flat -m store/app-store

We need to tell ngrx-data about our entities so we create an EntityMetadataMap and define a set of properties, one for each entity name.

We have two entities: Hero and Villain. As you might imagine, we add one line of code for every additional entity. That's it!

Replace the code in the entity-store.modules.ts with the following code.

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { EntityMetadataMap, NgrxDataModule } from 'ngrx-data';

export const entityMetadata: EntityMetadataMap = {
  Hero: {},
  Villain: {}
};

// because the plural of "hero" is not "heros"
export const pluralNames = { Hero: 'Heroes' };

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    NgrxDataModule.forRoot({
      entityMetadata: entityMetadata,
      pluralNames: pluralNames
    })
  ]
})
export class EntityStoreModule {}

ngrx-data handles getting and saving our data for us. Replace the contents of heroes/hero.service.ts with the following code.

import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { EntityServiceBase, EntityServiceFactory } from 'ngrx-data';
import { Hero } from '../core';

@Injectable()
export class HeroService extends EntityServiceBase<Hero> {
  constructor(entityServiceFactory: EntityServiceFactory) {
    super('Hero', entityServiceFactory);
  }
}

Replace the contents of villains/villain.service.ts with the following code.

import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { EntityServiceBase, EntityServiceFactory } from 'ngrx-data';
import { Villain } from '../core';

@Injectable()
export class VillainService extends EntityServiceBase<Villain> {
  constructor(entityServiceFactory: EntityServiceFactory) {
    super('Villain', entityServiceFactory);
  }
}

You may be wondering what happened to the ReactiveDataService in reactive-data.service.ts. It is no longer needed since our app is using ngrx-data! So we can remove this file from our app and remove the reference to it in core/index.ts.

Run the app!

ng serve -o

In retrospect, here are the changes we made to our app to add NgRx via the ngrx-data library.

• installed our dependencies
• added these files store/app-store.module.ts and store/entity-store.module.ts
• told NgRx and ngrx-data about our entities
• refactored and simplified our data services heroes/hero.service.ts and villains/villain.service.ts
• removed obsolete core/reactive-data.service.ts

OK, but why? Why did we do this? Why should I care?

We just added the redux pattern to our app and configured it for two entities. Your app may have dozens or even hundreds of entities. Now imagine what you would need to do to support all of those entities with this pattern. With ngrx-data you add a single line of code to store/entity-store.module.ts for each entity and that's it! You heard that right, one line!

ngrx-data provides all commonly used selectors, actions, action creators, reducers, and effects out of the box.

It is only natural that our apps may not follow the exact conventions that ngrx-data uses. That's OK! If your entity needs a different reducer or effect, you can replace those via configuration. If your web API url doesn't follow the pattern /api/heroes, that's OK! Just override the convention with your own configuration. All of the custom tweaks that you want are available to you when you need them.

When we migrated to ngrx-data, we lost the toast notifications that were part of the ReactiveDataService (now deleted). We can restore notifications with these easy, one-time steps.

Create a ngrx-data-toast.service.ts file using the following CLI command

ng g s store/ngrx-data-toast -m store/entity-store --spec false

The service listens to the ngrx-data EntityActions observable, which publishes all ngrx-data entity actions.

We'll only notify the user about HTTP success and failure so we use the built-in EntityActions.where() operator to filter for entity operation names that end in "_SUCCESS" or "_ERROR".

The subscribe method raises a toast message for those actions (toast.openSnackBar()).

import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { EntityActions, OP_ERROR, OP_SUCCESS } from 'ngrx-data';
import { ToastService } from '../core/toast.service';

/** Report ngrx-data success/error actions as toast messages **/
@Injectable()
export class NgrxDataToastService {
  constructor(actions$: EntityActions, toast: ToastService) {
    actions$
      .where(ea => ea.op.endsWith(OP_SUCCESS) || ea.op.endsWith(OP_ERROR))
      // this service never dies so no need to unsubscribe
      .subscribe(action =>
        toast.openSnackBar(`${action.entityName} action`, action.op)
      );
  }
}