JSON serialization of Realm.Object & Realm.Collection (incl. polished TS declarations)

[steffenagger]

JSON serialization of Realm.Object & Realm.Collection & a rework of TS declarations

This PR is a port of #3013 to the v10 branch.

These changes fixes #2997 & drastically simplifies realm/realm-studio#1312

Progress (subject to change)

TS declarations (used in integration-tests)

• Limit input in create<T>(...) to match a model (using @nirinchev's ExtractPropertyNamesOfType©) notion of any implications this could introduce, is welcome!.
• Allow input to contain Array<T> in RealmPartialModel<T> instead of a defined Realm.Collection<T> in create<T>(...).
• Update objects<T>(...) to accommodate the underlying logic & different responses.
• Allow extending Realm.Object for class models.

toJSON on Realm.Object & Realm.Collection (this includes Realm.List & Realm.Results)

• Implement solution with object references (this introduces a cache to not return new objects).
• Ensure TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON is thrown for circular structures, not RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded.
• Implement & expose replacer for circular structures. *

* I've included a combined key of the table-type & _objectId() as unique $refId in Realm.JsonSerializationReplacer, for a (visual) reference in serialized JSON. This is only used in case a primaryKey is not defined.

Integration Tests

• Write test covering toJSON implementations for both interface/schema & class model usage.

Changelog

• Update CHANGELOG.md

[kneth]

LGTM

[blagoev]

the PR is good. with some comments. Good job 👍

[kraenhansen]

Great work! This is a minor suggestion to only call toJSON when we hit one of our own Collection / Object types.

[kraenhansen]

I'll be moving this forward while Steffen is 🍹 🏖️

[hudon]

correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this makes the type-checking too strict when you're updating a record using create(...UpdateMode.all) with a partial record, like:

interface Record {
  id: number;
  foo: number;
  bar: string;
}
const partOfModel: Partial<Record> = { id: 1, foo: 3 };
realm.create<Record>('record', partOfModel, UpdateMode.All);

TypeScript will throw an error saying Argument of type 'Partial<Record>' is not assignable to parameter of type 'RealmInsertionModel<Record>'

FYI @blagoev @steffenagger

[steffenagger]

@hudon I suspect you're right - and thanks for the example.
The thing that springs to mind is if using UpdateMode.Never we would still like to require a full model / warn about missing props... I'll have a look!