Skip to content

Allow generic extensions to Id #13

Open
@CMCDragonkai

Description

@CMCDragonkai

Specification

It would be nice for users to be able to extend IdInternal which can allow us to specialise the encoding functions into the child classes.

class NodeIdInternal extends IdInternal {
  pubic toMultibase(): string {
    return super.toMultibase('base32hex');
  }
}

const nodeId = NodeIdInternal.create(/* ... */);
nodeId.toMultibase();
// instead of nodesUtils.encodeNodeId();

However this is not really possible easily due to the fact that Id type is a union of IdInternal and number.

There's a potential way to do this though with "polymorphic static this" MatrixAI/Polykey#321 (comment)

type Id<T = IdInternal> = T & number;

class IdInternal extends Uint8Array {
  static create<T extends typeof IdInternal>(this: T): Id<InstanceType<T>> {
    return (new this() as Id<InstanceType<T>>);
  }
  baseMethod () {
  }
}

type NodeId = Id<NodeIdInternal>;

class NodeIdInternal extends IdInternal {
  derivedMethod () { }
}

class ClaimIdInternal extends IdInternal {
  anotherMethod () {}
}

class SomeOtherIdOfId extends ClaimIdInternal {
}

const x = IdInternal.create();
const y = NodeIdInternal.create();
const z = SomeOtherIdOfId.create();

// console.log(x.baseMethod());

function doSomething(x: NodeId) {
  const pojo = { };
  pojo[x] = 123;
}

doSomething(x); // this is a type error
doSomething(y);

This makes Id itself a generic type, and it allows all downstream classes to override instance encoding methods like toMultibase or otherwise, and also mean that NodeIdInternal.create would create Id<NodeIdInternal>, which you can match with type NodeId = Id<NodeIdInternal>.

One tradeoff is that's complex for child classes to extend any static methods of IdInternal, but that's unlikely to be needed at all. The only methods that child classes may want to extend are all the encoding methods, and potentially adding new features to their ID objects.

Note that this means right now where alot of functions hand off their decoding to idUtils, they would need to be changed to refer to the current constructor. So like fromBuffer cannot just call idUtils.fromBuffer since that's hardcoded to call IdInternal, but instead refer to this.

Additional context

Tasks

  1. ...
  2. ...
  3. ...

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions