In Reflex, an event action is a special behavior that occurs during or after processing an event on the frontend.

Event actions can modify how the browser handles DOM events or throttle and debounce events before they are processed by the backend.

An event action is specified by accessing attributes and methods present on all EventHandlers and EventSpecs.

Added in v0.3.2

The .prevent_default action prevents the default behavior of the browser for the action. This action can be added to any existing event, or it can be used on its own by specifying rx.prevent_default as an event handler.

A common use case for this is to prevent navigation when clicking a link.

The .stop_propagation action stops the event from propagating to parent elements.

This action is often used when a clickable element contains nested buttons that should not trigger the parent element's click event.

In the following example, the first button uses .stop_propagation to prevent the click event from propagating to the outer vstack. The second button does not use .stop_propagation, so the click event will also be handled by the on_click attached to the outer vstack.

Added in v0.5.0

For events that are fired frequently, it can be useful to throttle or debounce them to avoid network latency and improve performance. These actions both take a single argument which specifies the delay time in milliseconds.

The .throttle action limits the number of times an event is processed within a a given time period. It is useful for on_scroll and on_mouse_move events which are fired very frequently, causing lag when handling them in the backend.

In the following example, the on_scroll event is throttled to only fire every half second.

The .debounce action delays the processing of an event until the specified timeout occurs. If another event is triggered during the timeout, the timer is reset and the original event is discarded.

Debounce is useful for handling the final result of a series of events, such as moving a slider.

In the following example, the slider's on_change handler, update_value, is only triggered on the backend when the slider value has not changed for half a second.

Added in v0.6.6

The .temporal action prevents events from being queued when the backend is down. This is useful for non-critical events where you do not want them to pile up if there is a temporary connection issue.

In the following example, the rx.moment component with interval and on_change uses .temporal to prevent periodic updates from being queued when the backend is down: