originalReducerState

This sidebar discussion provides some insight into originalReducerState (mostly an internal implementation detail).

A fundamental aspect of sequentially joining reducers is that each reducer should be able to build on what has been accomplished by a prior reducer. In essence it is an accumulative process.

The joinReducers utility handles this by cumulatively passing the state parameter that was returned from any prior reducer (in the chain of reducers to execute).

While this does NOT relax the immutable constraint of the reducer's state parameter, it is possible for a down-stream reducer to receive a state parameter that is a different instance from the start of the reduction process (because an up-stream reducer needed to alter it in some way).

As it turns out, this is typically NOT a concern to a client, rather merely an implementation detail.

There are edge cases, however, where a client needs visibility to the originalReducerState: the immutable state at the start of the reduction process. One case in particular is determining that state has changed within a series of reductions (i.e. joinReducers), because each individual reducer only has visibility of the state within it's own reduction process. This case is higlighted in A Most Excellent Example.

As a result, the originalReducerState is publicly exposed as the 3rd parameter to the conditionalReducerCB function (the conditionalReducer callback parameter that makes this determination).

Internally, the way in which astx-redux-util manages the originalReducerState is by passing it as a 3rd parameter to any reducer it is in control of (i.e. invokes). While from a redux perspective, this is non-standard, it doesn't really hurt, because reducer functions are NOT reasoning about a 3rd parameter. The only risk is if redux should (at some future point) start to employ additional reducer parameters.

By an overwhelming majority of the time (99.9%), you should seldom have to worry about how originalReducerState is maintained, because astx-redux-util does this for you.

The only time any of this concerns you is if your application reducer invokes one of the astx-redux-util reducers. In this case (which is rare), your code is responsible for passing originalReducerState (the 3rd reducer parameter) to the downstream reducer.