A brief summary of a typical workflow from Guppy

middleware-workflow.md

Let's walk through adding a new dependency - I think that's complex enough without being too much to grasp:

• User clicks Add to Project after searching for and finding a dependency
• ADD_DEPENDENCY_START action is fired using addDependencyStart action creator
• ADD_DEPENDENCY_START workflow from dependency.middleware is fired
• this, in turn, fires off installDependency from dependencies.service
• dependencies.reducer updates the state for that project to indicate that the new dependency is installing
• installDependency spawns a child shell process to actually run yarn add lodash or whatever
• the dependency finishes installing, which resolves the Promise returned by installDependency and moves to the next step of the middleware, loadProjectDependency
• loadProjectDependency (from read-from-disk.service) loads the specifics about the newly installed dependency and dispatches them as an ADD_DEPENDENCY_FINISH action using the addDependencyFinish action creator
• if installDependency or loadProjectDependency fail, an ADD_DEPENDENCY_ERROR action is dispatched using the addDependencyError action creator
• dependencies.reducer will handle ADD_DEPENDENCY_FINISH or ADD_DEPENDENCY_ERROR accordingly and update the project's state

Since middleware are constructed like

const middleware = store => next => action => {
  /* ... */
}

You can dispatch actions in one of two ways:

// dispatch an action to the beginning of the middleware chain
store.dispatch(/* ACTION */);

// dispatch an action AND SKIP ANY MIDDLEWARE BEFORE AND INCLUDING THIS ONE
// * this helps to avoid infinite looping in case you're dispatching an
// action you're also handling
next(/* ACTION */);

So all the next() calls in middleware are essentially just store.dispatch() (this tripped me up for a while).

To try and summarize:

• actions - tell us that something needs to happen
• reducers - update Redux state according to actions
• middleware - fire off side-effects of actions
• services - utility methods for interacting with the host OS