safe-cast

safe-cast

A typescript library to safely cast unknown or unstructured data to a Typescript type.

1 minute Getting Started guide

To install this library in your own code:

# if using NPM
npm install --save safe-cast
# if using Yarn
yarn add safe-cast

The vast majority of the time you will want to just create a typescript type and use the safeCast method.

Create a Typescript Type that you want to cast your data to:

export type TestType = {
  /**
   * @minimum 0
   * @TJS-type integer
   */
  id: number;

  /**
   * @maxLength 50
   */
  name: string;

  values: {
    val1: string,
    val2?: string
  }
}

Note: Notice the annotations on the type properties (like @maxLength)? The annotations that you can set here are JSON Schema annotations and they will be honoured by this library. For the full list of supported annotations please see the typescript-json-schema library.

Once your type that you wish to cast to is declared then you can use the safeCast function to cast and validate in the one safe and secure step:

import { safeCast, CastError } from 'safe-cast';

const testType = safeCast<TestType>("TestType", ['path/to/TestType.ts'], {
    id: 1234,
    name: 'hi',
    values: {
      val1: 'woo'
    }
  });

if (testType instanceof CastError) {
  // Handle the error
} else {
  // Use the TestType data happy in the knowledge that the cast was safe
}

The trickiest part for users of this library to correctly specify is the path to their TS files that they should pass to the second argument of the safeCast function. This means that, when your program is running, you need to know the path to your uncompiled typescript files so that the safeCast function can introspect them to read the types. Remember that, when Typescript compiles to Javascript, all of the type information is stripped and it is that type information that the safeCast function needs to work.

Learn more

A solid base

This library was built, primarily, on top of typescript-json-schema and ajv; these two libraries provide the bulk of the functionality of safe-cast. This library provides the convenience of joining them together but, as a result, is intentionally a leaky abstraction over these libraries (typescript-json-schema is "leakier" than ajv). This is because it is desirable to use the annotations that typescript-json-schema accepts in your own types.

The dependencies on these two libraries makes much of the logic very robust and fast.

Advanced usage

The safeCast method is supposed to handle 90% of the expected usage of this library. It is good for the common use cases because:

• Performance
  It has internal caching behaviour, making it perform extremely quickly for repeated usage.
• Simplicity
  You only need to provide four arguments. The Type you wish to cast to, the name of the same type for lookup purposes, the data you are casting to your given type and the set of Typescript files that should be loaded to introspect your types.
• Fits your workflow
  It is expected that you will already have Typescript types lying around. You should just be able to point the safeCast function at already existing files / data and expect it to "just work".

Despite those advantages, there may be other cases that cause you to deviate from the safeCast function.

There are two other classes that may be of interest to you.

• TypescriptSafeCast
  This class is designed to load one or more typescript files and their respective types, convert those types into JSON Schema and then use ajv to validate the data you are trying to cast against that schema. This is the class that we use to back the safeCast method.

  The benefit of using the TypescriptSafeCast class is that you can more tightly control the loading and performance of the casting. The constructor for the TypescriptSafeCast function is slow (on the order of seconds) but the TypescriptSafeCast#cast method is fast (on the order of milliseconds).

  Also, the TypescriptSafeCast class exposes the ability to pass more fine grained options down to the typscript-json-schema and ajv libraries; allowing you to customise behaviour to your needs. More and more features will be exposed through the TypescriptSafeCast class over time.

• SchemaSafeCast
  The process for TypescriptSafeCast#cast is: Parse Typescript Types => Convert Type To JSON Schema => Validate incoming data against JSON Schema. The first two steps of this flow are slow. Therefore, for those developers that are willing to write and maintain their own JSON Schemas (or want to build them at compile time for use at runtime); we provide the SchemaSafeCast function. For this function, you just provide a valid JSON Schema in the constructor and then the cast function will do the rest.

  Benchmarking shows that the SchemaSafeCast#cast function is the most performant function in this library by a few orders of magnitude. Use the SchemaSafeCast if you want blazing speed.

Hopefully this helps you use this library in a way that meets your needs.