Global actions

If we use the nested TEA for our application, we will most likely need a way for the nested modules to communicate with the top levels. For example:

  • Open a notification
  • Sign out the user
  • Return a value to the top level

There are many way of achieving this. One possible way is to have a module with global actions e.g.

module Actions exposing (..)

type Action
	= OpenSuccessNotification ...
	| OpenFailureNotifiation ...
	| ...

The all your nested module will return three elements on update. The third one being a list of actions to execute:

update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg, List Action)

Any nested module in the chain could add an action to the list.

Finally your root update will need to map through the list and process the actions.


  • A nice pattern for adding actions is to mimic Cmd.batch. E.g. Actions.batch.
  • We might need to send a message back to the module that returned the action. E.g. Open a dialog with selections. In this case our actions might need a message associated with them e.g. Action Msg. We will need a Actions.map to just like Html.map.