Passing in action creators to react-navigation - react-native

Question

I'm using the new react-navigation library for a React Native application I'm building. I'm having an issue with passing down my ActionCreators from my Nav component down to its scenes.
I have an AppContainer that wraps the entire application.
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { DrawerNavigator, addNavigationHelpers } from 'react-navigation';
import { connect } from 'react-redux';
import { bindActionCreators } from 'redux';
import { ActionCreators } from '../actions';
import DashboardContainer from './DashboardContainer';
import CustomersContainer from './CustomersContainer';
const ApplicationNavigation = DrawerNavigator({
Dashboard: { screen: DashboardContainer },
Customers: { screen: CustomersContainer },
});
class AppContainer extends Component {
render() {
return (
<ApplicationNavigation />
);
}
}
function mapDispatchToProps(dispatch) {
return bindActionCreators(ActionCreators, dispatch);
}
export default connect(() => { return {} }, mapDispatchToProps)(AppContainer);
Here is the CustomerContainer:
import React, {Component} from 'react';
import {View, Text, Button} from 'react-native';
export default class CustomerContainer extends Component {
btnPressed() {
this.props.listCustomers()
}
render () {
return (
<View style={{marginTop: 40}}><Text>Customer</Text>
<Button onPress={() => this.btnPressed()} title="Press Me!" />
</View>
);
}
}
Now I'm trying to call an action within my CustomerContainer this.props.listCustomers(). The problem is the ActionCreator props aren't being passed down to the screens. I've tried doing adding the screenProps prop to the ApplicationNavigation component:
But for some reason when I do this my app doesn't display any screens its just blank with no errors.
UPDATE
So I updated my CustomerContainer file:
import React, {Component} from 'react';
import {View, Text, Button} from 'react-native';
import { connect } from 'react-redux';
import { bindActionCreators } from 'redux';
import { ActionCreators } from '../actions';
class CustomerContainer extends Component {
btnPressed() {
console.log(this.props.listCompanyCustomers())
}
render () {
return (
<View style={{marginTop: 40}}><Text>Customer</Text>
<Button onPress={() => this.btnPressed()} title="Press Me!" />
</View>
);
}
}
function mapStateToProps(state) {
return {
companyCustomers: state.companyCustomers
};
}
function mapDispatchToProps(dispatch) {
return bindActionCreators(ActionCreators, dispatch);
}
export default connect(mapStateToProps, mapDispatchToProps)(CustomerContainer);
This now works; however this feels like the incorrect way to go about this.

Answer 1

What redux connect basically does is:
Wrap your component
Declare contextProps to get access to dispatch
pass the dispatch to your component props.
If you pass the connect mapDispatchToProps, then it creates the mapping of the methods to dispatch.
So if you connect you AppContainer, its children won't get these dispatch methods, unless AppContainer passes them to its children (but this what connect comes to prevent).
So to sum up, you should connect any component that needs to use dispatch, otherwise it won't get it.
If you don't want to copy paste the mapDispatchToProps, you can just delete it and use this.props.dispatch instead:
import { ActionCreators } from '../actions';
class CustomerContainer extends Component {
btnPressed() {
this.props.dispatch(ActionCreators.listCompanyCustomers());
}
render () {
return (
<View style={{marginTop: 40}}><Text>Customer</Text>
<Button onPress={() => this.btnPressed()} title="Press Me!" />
</View>
);
}
}