Freshness

• Freshness

• Allowing extra properties

• Use Case: React

Freshness

TypeScript provides a concept of Freshness (also called strict object literal checking) to make it easier to type check object literals that would otherwise be structurally type compatible.

Structural typing is extremely convenient. Consider the following piece of code. This allows you to very conveniently upgrade your JavaScript to TypeScript while still preserving a level of type safety:

function logName(something: { name: string }) {
    console.log(something.name);
}

var person = { name: 'matt', job: 'being awesome' };
var animal = { name: 'cow', diet: 'vegan, but has milk of own species' };
var random = { note: `I don't have a name property` };

logName(person); // okay
logName(animal); // okay
logName(random); // Error: property `name` is missing

However, structural typing has a weakness in that it allows you to misleadingly think that something accepts more data than it actually does. This is demonstrated in the following code which TypeScript will error on as shown:

function logName(something: { name: string }) {
    console.log(something.name);
}

logName({ name: 'matt' }); // okay
logName({ name: 'matt', job: 'being awesome' }); // Error: object literals must only specify known properties. `job` is excessive here.

Note that this error only happens on object literals. Without this error one might look at the call logName({ name: 'matt', job: 'being awesome' }) and think that logName would do something useful with job where as in reality it will completely ignore it.

Another big use case is with interfaces that have optional members, without such object literal checking, a typo would type check just fine. This is demonstrated below:

function logIfHasName(something: { name?: string }) {
    if (something.name) {
        console.log(something.name);
    }
}
var person = { name: 'matt', job: 'being awesome' };
var animal = { name: 'cow', diet: 'vegan, but has milk of own species' };

logIfHasName(person); // okay
logIfHasName(animal); // okay
logIfHasName({neme: 'I just misspelled name to neme'}); // Error: object literals must only specify known properties. `neme` is excessive here.

The reason why only object literals are type checked this way is because in this case additional properties that aren't actually used is almost always a typo or a misunderstanding of the API.

Allowing extra properties

A type can include an index signature to explicitly indicate that excess properties are permitted:

var x: { foo: number, [x: string]: any };
x = { foo: 1, baz: 2 };  // Ok, `baz` matched by index signature

Use Case: React State

Facebook ReactJS offers a nice use case for object freshness. Quite commonly in a component you call setState with only a few properties instead of passing in all the properties, i.e.:

// Assuming
interface State {
  foo: string;
  bar: string;
}

// You want to do: 
this.setState({foo: "Hello"}); // Error: missing property bar

// But because state contains both `foo` and `bar` TypeScript would force you to do: 
this.setState({foo: "Hello", bar: this.state.bar}};

Using the idea of freshness you would mark all the members as optional and you still get to catch typos!:

// Assuming
interface State {
  foo?: string;
  bar?: string;
}

// You want to do: 
this.setState({foo: "Hello"}); // Yay works fine!

// Because of freshness it's protected against typos as well!
this.setState({foos: "Hello"}}; // Error: Objects may only specify known properties

// And still type checked
this.setState({foo: 123}}; // Error: Cannot assign number to a string