In the spirit of minimising state I always have a desire to mix data types for a given state property. For instance, if I were creating a React page that rendered a list of items that could either be the entire list of items, or a filtered list of items, I might want to have a state property called itemList and another one called filteredItemList.
Now in filteredItemList I might want to differentiate between a filter query returning no results vs the filteredItemList being empty because a filter is not currently 'set'.
I'm thinking I could set filteredItemList to the string "no filter active" when a filter isn't active. I could also set it as an array with 0 elements when a filter is active but returned zero results. And lastly, if a filter is active and does have results, it would be an array with a length greater than 0.
Doing this, I could test for this property's string value, and/or its array length, to determine what and how to render.
I am thinking that one benefit to doing this would be to obviously minimise the amount of state properties.
I am wondering if there are any inevitable drawbacks to doing something like this?
