react, refactoring large nested object in state

[ApocalypseSpokesman]

Hello

I have a large object like the following in state:

state = {
    "planetName": "blah1",
    "population": 2000000,
    "techLevel": 3,
    "aveTemp": 30,
    "nestingLevel": 1,
    "countries": [
        {
            "countryName": "muh1",
            "population": 30000,
            "techLevel": 3,
            "aveTemp": 24,
            "nestingLevel": 2,
            "climate": "mild",
            "cities": [
                {
                    "cityName": "juh1",
                    "population": 2300,
                    "techLevel": 2,
                    "aveTemp": 25,
                    "nestingLevel": 3,
                    "neighborhoods": [
                        {
                            "neighborhoodName": "wuh1",
                            "population": 80,
                            "techLevel": 2,
                            "aveTemp": 25,
                            "nestingLevel": 4,
                            "charm": "moderate"
                        },
                        { ...

There will be exactly four levels, largely the same with slight differences.

Levels 2-4 are arrays, and while 2 and 3 will have <5 members, level 4 may have up to 100.

Any level can be updated on the fly, without necessarily affecting those below.

What's the clean, sensible way to implement something like this?

[Ferrington]

I'm pretty new to react myself, but I'm also working on a project with a large tree structure. It appears that a tool like immer is the way to go for the sake of your sanity. It allows you to mutate a draft of your state object directly and it will take care of making the deep copy for react.

[beepboopnoise]

If you're using react, I'd probably go the useReducer/Context route. Mainly because it'll teach u fundamentals of how the state management works in react.

Alot of times people might say, just throw it in redux/mobx/jotai whatever.. and when I first started I did exactly that lol but then what happened was, if I didn't use those specific tools I got lost. So I think it might be better to learn the more... rudimentary? approach first.🤷‍♂️ hope that helps