TS Mongo

Strongly-typed Mongo native driver.

Philosophy

Mongodb's node-native driver and mongoose both provide poor typescript support. They need to support every query and update that is allowed by the spec, which is difficult to encapsulate in typescript. The result is promiscuous typesafety that allows even unsafe queries and input values to pass typecheck.

We re-type the node-native driver to provide uptight type-safety. We choose to have type-safety disallow queries that are hard to type or which we deem poor practice. While there are plenty of valid mongo queries our type checking disallows, our aim is to minimize bad queries that pass type checking.

Getting Started

To create a type-safe drop-in replacement

const collection = mkTsCollection<TSchema>(db, 'collection-name')
const result = await collection.findOne(...) // now with better type safety
const unsafeResult = await collection.unsafe.findOne(...) // with old types

Example

Assume you have a collection type of

{ admin: { name: string; email: string }[] }

The mongo native driver allows queries of the form

{ `admin.2.name`: 'Joe' }

to select the second value in the array admin. In the native driver, this is accomplished via type template-literal typing

{ [x: `admin.${number}.name`]?: string }

Unfortunately, this is overly promiscuous and allows any field, i.e. this query type checks:

{ 'not-a-field': 'bad query!' }

By default, we only allow you to select the 0'th element. This solves the problem template literal problem.

As a concession, Filter takes an optional second argument (defaults to 0), which can be made number for those seeking the original promiscuous behavior.
In general, we believe it's not typesafe to select arbitrarily into an array so allowing an arbitrary number is probably not great programming practice.

Converter

Many middleware functions are handled by the converter, which is like a type-safe middleware that can transform the type of the collection. For example, convertToTimeCollection implements createdAt and updatedAt fields on a collection. See convertReadWriteCollection.

How to fix bugs in TsMongo

When using the code, you may notice mistakes in TsMongo's typing behavior (e.g. https://github.com/tianhuil/aerial-app/pull/804).

Look at the type for .sort (e.g. TsSort)
Build a test case in the assert file (e.g. sort.assert.ts where we added .h and .i).
Then investigate the original file (e.g. sort.ts) and hack things until you pass testing. Red underlines appear in VSCode to tell you if the typing doesn't work.

This is solved in https://github.com/tianhuil/aerial-app/pull/805

Roadmap

Aggregation (still incomplete)
Mapreduce
Geography Operators
Bit Operators