Lentes

Lentes is an idiomatic TypeScript library for constructing fully typed lenses, a nice functional design pattern for navigating and transforming immutable objects, in a declarative and string-free way.

Installation

Lentes is available on npm, just add it to your project's dependencies:

# if you use npm 
npm install lentes --save
 
# or, if you rather use yarn 
yarn add lentes

So... What are lenses?

This library works around the idea of Lenses. You can think of lens as a bidirectional transform function that can be used to read or update a field nested deep inside an immutable object. So instead of doing this:

const user = {
  name: 'User McUserson',
  transactions: [
    {kind: 'buy', ammount: 10 },
    {kind: 'buy', ammount: 20 },
    {kind: 'sell', ammount: 15 }
  ]
}
 
const updatedUser = {
  ...user,
  transactions: Object.assign([], user.transactions, {[1]: {...user.transactions[1], ammount: 25 }})
}

you can do this:

const user = { ... }
const lens = lens(user).transactions[1].ammount
 
const updatedUser = lens(user, 25)

Lenses might also be used to replace harcoded strings as object identifiers. This is specially useful to link objects in separate graphs:

const $user = lens(user)
 
// Instead of the error-prompt alternative:
createTextBox({value: 'user.name'})
 
// You can write
createTextBox({value: $user.name})

Usage

Use the default export of the library to build root lenses:

import lens from 'lentes'
 
// You can create lenses from a type...
const aLensForYourClass = lens<SomeType>()
 
// ...or a class instance...
const anotherLensForYourClass = lens(new SomeClass())
 
// ...or any other object.
const lensForThingsWithFoo = lens({foo: 'bar'})

Lenses expose the same properties as the types they are built from, which can be used to build new lenses pointing to those properties:

const yourObject = { x: { ys: [{z: 1}, {z: 2}, {z: 3}] } }
const $yourObject = lens(yourObject)
 
// This lens points to the z field of the second entry in the ys array of the x field of yourObject.
const l = $yourObject.x.ys[1].z

Notice how you can build lens to a certain element of an array by accessing it's index on the array lens. Also, since lens are fully typed, you can navigate their interface aided by your favorite IDE autocomplete and invalid accesses will be rejected by the typechecker.

Once you have a lens, you can either apply it with a single argument to retrieve the pointed value or apply with a second argument to obtain a copy of the object with that property updated:

const yourObject = { x: { ys: [{z: 1}, {z: 2}, {z: 3}] } }
const $yourObject = lens(yourObject)
const l = $yourObject.x.ys[1].z
 
l(yourObject) // returns 2
l(yourObject, 7) // returns { x: { ys: [{z: 1}, {z: 7}, {z: 3}] } }

Alternatively, you can use a function as second argument. If so, the object will be updated with the result of applying that function to the current value:

const yourObject = { x: { ys: [{z: 1}, {z: 2}, {z: 3}] } }
const $yourObject = lens(yourObject)
const l = $yourObject.x.ys
 
l(yourObject, currentYs => [currentYs[2]]) // returns { x: { ys: [{z: 3}] } }

Lenses also convert to sensible strings that can be used as local ids:

const yourObject = { x: { ys: [{z: 1}, {z: 2}, {z: 3}] } }
const $yourObject = lens(yourObject)
const l = $yourObject.x.ys[0].z
 
// All these lines return "/x/ys/0/z/"
l.toString()
l.toPrimitive()
`${l}`

Contributions

Please report any bugs, requests or ideas on the issues section of this repository and we will try to see to it as soon as possible. Pull requests are always welcome! Just try to keep them small and clean.

License

This code is open source software licensed under the ISC License by The Uqbar Foundation. Feel free to use it accordingly.