Contexts

Contexts are a mainstay not just of React, but of most major frameworks these days. They make a lot of sense in the world of components and DOM - provide some value for all of the children in this part of the tree. It falls naturally out of the tree-oriented data structure backing everything.

Signalium includes contexts as well. A basic example looks like:

import { createContext, withContexts, reactive } from 'signalium';

const ApiPrefixContext = createContext('/api/');

const useUsersUrl = reactive(() => {
  const prefix = useContext(ApiPrefixContext);

  return `${prefix}users`;
});

// '/api/users'
const usersUrl = useUsersUrl();

// '/api-v2/users'
const usersV2Url = withContexts([[ApiPrefixContext, '/api-v2/']], () => {
  return useUsersUrl();
});

However, Signalium is also designed to work in many places without the DOM - it can be used on the server, in background tasks and webworkers, in Node apps, and so on. Really, it can be used anywhere that you can use plain JavaScript functions, just making them reactive instead of a single function call.

So, how do we think of these values if we're thinking beyond the DOM tree?

Contexts as implicits

Just like the DOM, function execution forms a tree, where each function call is a node and its children are the functions that it calls, e.g. the callstack tree.

In this mental model, contexts can be thought of as implicit parameters that are in scope for all functions below a certain part of the callstack tree. These are essentially like contextual parameters in Scala and similar functional languages.

Going all the way back to signal purity, we said that given the same parameters and the same signal state, a signal-pure function is guaranteed to return the same result. In this model, contexts are simply extra parameters that are accessed lazily, so our statement still holds. If we run a signal in two different contexts, the results could be different. But if the context is the same, then the value will be the same and we can reuse the result between function calls.

Signalium manages this under the hood, forking reactive functions if new contexts are set.

import { createContext, withContexts, reactive } from 'signalium';

const LogContext = createContext('root');

const useLog = reactive(() => {
  console.log(useContext(LogContext));
});

useLog(); // logs 'root'
useLog(); // does not log

withContexts([[LogContext, 'child']], () => {
  useLog(); // logs 'child'
  useLog(); // does not log
});

All contexts are collectively treated like a single parameter in terms of forking. So if you use withContexts with any context, all reactives used within that context will rerun. Most contexts are used at the top level of an application for dependency injection, so this generally is not an issue, but if you do use a child context, you should be aware that it could cause functions to rerun even if they do not consume the overridden child context.

Contexts and mutable state

Contexts themselves are considered immutable. Like parameters, when you call a reactive function with a different context value, it will always create a new instance of that reactive and call its function again. If you want to update a context, you can set it as a signal within the context.

import { createContext, withContexts, reactive, state } from 'signalium';

const apiPrefix = state('/');
const ApiPrefixContext = createContext(apiPrefix);

const useUsersUrl = reactive(() => {
  const prefix = useContext(ApiPrefixContext).get();

  return `${prefix}users`;
});

// '/api/users'
const usersUrl = useUsersUrl();

apiPrefix.set('/api-v2/');

// '/api-v2/users'
const usersUrlV2 = useUsersUrl();

Summary

And that's all there is to know about contexts. Contexts are invaluable for accessing semi-global state, such as an api or database client, so while they are not technically a core part of the signals powering Signalium, they are a crucial component for writing signal-based apps ergonomically, and that's why they're included.