May 1st, 2017
4:03 pm
Typescript duck typing error when casting a reference.

Posted under Angular & TypeScript
Tags , , ,

The following code fragment in a dao gave an error when casting the response json. The cause is not clear, but 2 code variations were tried:-

//API calls
getFeatures(): Observable<FeaturesSearchResult> {
return this.http.get(this.queryFeatures())
      // *** This version originally failed citing that property total_rows did not exist
.map(response => {return <FeaturesSearchResult>(response.json())});
}

I then tried using the “as” operator for the cast instead of the <> syntax. This worked. Strangely, right at the end I managed to get an example with the”<>” syntax working too, but the reason and differences were not at all clear.
However, I noted that the latter is also the preferred syntax now, as unlike the “<>” syntax it is also compatible with JSX/.tsx syntax (JSX is an embeddable React xml-like syntax which transforms into JavaScript)
See here for details on JSX/.tsx, and on the React wikipedia entry. The working code fragment follows:-

//API calls
getFeatures(): Observable<FeaturesSearchResult> {
return this.http.get(this.queryFeatures())// *** This version originally failed citing that property total_rows did not exist
      // *** This version worked by using the “as …” syntax for casting rather than <>
.map(response => {return response.json() as FeaturesSearchResult});
}

The full listing of the code for the working version (less imports for brevity) follows:-

features-dao.ts
@Injectable()
export class FeaturesDao {
constructor(private appConfig: AppConfig,
private http: Http) {}

//API calls
getFeatures(): Observable<FeaturesSearchResult> {
return this.http.get(this.queryFeatures())
.map(response => {return response.json() as FeaturesSearchResult});
}

//API query definitions
queryFeatures(): string {
return `${this.appConfig.apiBase}_design/places/_view/featuresByOrdinal?include_docs=true`;
}

}
export interface FeaturesSearchResult extends CouchDBResult<FeaturesSearchResultRow> {}
export interface FeaturesSearchResultRow extends CouchDBResultRow<number[], any, FeatureDoc> {}
couchdb-result.ts
export interface CouchDBResult<R extends CouchDBResultRow<any,any,any>> {
total_rows: number;
offset: number;
rows: R[];
}

export interface CouchDBResultRow<K,V,D> {
id: string;
key: K;
value: V;
doc?: D;
}
feature-doc.ts
export interface FeatureDoc extends CouchDBDoc {
ordinal: number;
name: string;
description: string;
searchable: boolean;
rateable: boolean;
}

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