About The Project

This library was built while I was searching an elegant way to interact with web endpoints in my typescript based apps in such a way that I don’t need to remember all endpoints, their return types, payload types ecc.. For sure you can create constants for your endpoints and add tricky typescript types to map request and responses, but I was looking for a standard way to easily use in all my apps.

I was using the awesome library React Query for my networking operations, and I was (and still) really love it, but it is lacking a way to map query keys with their underling types.

After some struggling I found a pattern which is working for me, so I built a library on top of this idea.

This library is built on top of React Query’s api (so if you know how to use it, you don’t need to learn anything new), and uses Axios for the networking.

By strongly relying on typescript’s type augmentation, this library will allow you to define the endpoints your app is using and strongly link types to them.

By using typescript’s augmentation feature, you will define your routes along with response and payload types and then you will be able to have strong typing for your endpoints

A companion web application to define the routes and generate the full api configuration is under development, please start this repository if you are interested in it

Built On Top Of

• React Query
• Axios

Prerequisites

you need to have the following libraries already installed:

• React Query
• Axios

Getting Started

Install the library from npm registry

Installation

This is an example of how to list things you need to use the software and how to install them.

• npm

npm i apperside/react-query-typed-api

• yarn

yarn add apperside/react-query-typed-api

Usage

This library is a wrapper around react-query, so before you begin using this library, you need to install and configure react-query as explained in their docs.

react-query-typed-api is also heavily based on the concept of augmentation, you can find more about typescript augmentation in the dedicated documentation.

The first interface to know about is AppRoutes, which is declared as follows

    export interface AppRoutes {
      main: MainApi
    }
    
    export interface MainApi {
      /**
       * TO BE AUGMENTED
       */
    }

The statement main: MainApi means that the app has one default api, whose scope is main. You can create as many scopes you want, we will speak about api scopes later on .

In order to agument the main scope and add your routes, you have to augment MainApi interface

    /**
     * You have to add this declaration wherever you want to augment librariy's types
     */
    declare module "react-query-typed-api" {
      /**
       * Augment this interface to add al custom endpoints
       */
      export interface MainApi {
        // MyApiResponseType and MyApiPayloadType are whatever type you want depending on your endpoint response and payload
        "my-route": { responseType: MyApiResponseType, payloadType: MyApiPayloadType }
        // if the payload is the same as the response, you can omit the payloadType 
        "another-custom-route": { responseType: MyApiResponseType2 }
      }
    }

let say we augment our main api like this

    type MyApiResponseType = { responseField1: string }
    type MyApiPayloadType = { payloadField1: string }
    type MyApiResponseType2 = { responseField2: string }
    
    declare module "react-query-typed-api" {
      export interface MainApi {
        "my-route": { responseType: MyApiResponseType, payloadType: MyApiPayloadType }
        "another-custom-route": { responseType: MyApiResponseType2 }
      }
    }

We are defining 2 routes: my-route: it will return data of type MyApiResponseType, and it will accept data of type MyApiPayloadType when using mutation. another-custom-route: it will return data of type MyApiResponseType, and it will accept data of type MyApiPayloadType when using mutation.

With such configuration you will have the following typescript behavior

showcase-simple.mp4

IMPORTANT: every entry under MainApi must have these fields:

responseType mandatory, it represents the type of the response and the type of the payload if payloadType is not defined

payloadType optional, it represents the type of the payload for mutations, responseType will be used if not provided

mutationResponseType optional, it represents the response type for mutations, responseType will be used if not provided

useAppQuery is nothing else that a wrapper around react-query’s useQuery, it just wraps it with strong typing thanks to typescript augmentation. Together with useAppQuery there is also useAppMutation

As your can see, types are automatically inferred based on the types declared through augmentation

PATH PARAMS

You can also use routes with variable parameters. Given we augment the api like this

      type MyApiResponseType = { field1: string }
      type MyApiPayloadType = { field2: string }
      
      export interface MainApi {
            "my-route/:id": { responseType: MyApiResponseType, payloadType: MyApiPayloadType },
      }

we can use this endpoint like this:

QUERY

    const query = useAppQuery("my-route/:id", { pathParams: { id: "123" } });

MUTATION

    const mutation = useAppMutation("my-route/:id")
    // the _ before pathParams is not a typo, read below for more info
    mutation.mutate({ field2: "value", _pathParams: { id: "123" } })

⚠️ Type inferring does not work for path params, and probably it never will ?

A note about mutate and mutateAsync methods: In react-query, when you call mutate or mutateAsync, you can just pass the payload for the request and an options object where you can pass just some callbacks. To allow the best possible integration for path params, we added _pathParams as a valid field to pass to mutate and mutateAsync, because sometimes it may be tricky to have the values to use as path variables at the moment you call useMutation (imagine for example a form submission, you most probably will have the value you need only when the form is submitted).

Since this field will never be passed to the request payload, we prefixed it with underscore to allow you to pass a pathParams field (without underscore) to you payload in case you may need. If you will need to pass a _pathParams field to your payload, it will not work

API SCOPES

You can use augmentation to add as many set of apis as you need, you just need to augment the interface AppRoutes. An api scope is intended to be a group of endpoint pointing to the same server and having the same prefix. Let say you augment it in the following way

      type MyApiResponseType = { responseField1: string }
      type MyApiPayloadType = { payloadField1: string }
      type MyApiResponseType2 = { responseField2: string }
    
      export interface MainApi {
        "my-route/:id": { responseType: MyApiResponseType, payloadType: MyApiPayloadType },
      }
    
      /**
       * Augment this interface to as many groups of api you need.
       * A group of api is a set of endpoints that share the same prefix,server,port and protocol
       */
      export interface AppRoutes {
        
        anotherApi: {
          "another-api-route": { responseType: { anotherApiResponseField: string } }
        }
      }

You will be able to use the other scopes like this

      const query = useAppQuery({ scope: "anotherApi", route: "another-api-route" });
    
      const mutation = useAppMutation({ scope: "anotherApi", route: "another-api-route" })

You will have full intellisense also in this case

api-scope-showcase.mp4

INITIALIZATION

After you have defined all of your routes, you need to initialize the library by providing the server informations for all the defined api scopes. A good point to do this could be the same point where you initialize react-query’s queryClient and pass it to the app’s context (as explained in their docs)

    import { initNetworking } from "react-query-typed-api";
    
	initNetworking({
	  servers: {
	    main: {
	      apiUrl: "https://my-api-url.com/api",
	    },
	    anotherApi: {
	      apiUrl: "https://another-api-url/v1",
	    },
	  },
	});

The initNetworking function takes the following arguments:

SERVER CONFIGURATION The servers field is an object which accepts the following values:

useAppQuery

The useAppQuery hook accepts 3 arguments:

routeOrRouteObj (mandatory) This parameter can be:

• a string representing any route inside the main scope
• an object with the following properties

{
     scope:"<one of your api scopes>",
     route:"a route in the scope"
}

appQueryOptions

appQueryOptions accepts the following values:

useQueryOptions The options you would pass to react-query’s useQuery()

useAppMutation

The useAppMutation hook will take in input the same parameters as useAppQuery(), plus the payload property which represents the request’s payload.

useAppQueryClient

Together with useAppQuery and useAppMutation, we also crafted useAppQueryClient, a wrapper around queryClient, you can use it the following way

import { useAppQueryClient } from  "react-query-typed-api";

The following methods have been ported

• invalidateAppQueries
• refetchAppQueries
• isFetching
• isMutating
• getQueryData
• setQueryData
• removeQueries
• resetQueries
• cancelQueries
• invalidateQueries
• refetchQueries
• fetchQuery
• prefetchQuery
• executeMutation
• setDefaultOptions
• setQueryDefaults
• getQueryDefaults
• setMutationDefaults
• getMutationDefaults

Here is an example how how it works with invalidateQueries method, but it works the same with the other methods

showcase-useQueryClient.mp4

Differences with react-query

The way useAppQuery and useAppMutation works is exacly the same as react-query. Since this is 100% true for useAppQuery, on useAppMutation we added there is a small difference one as the although useAppQuery can be used in the same and exact way as useQuery is used, some little change has been added to mutate and mutateAsync

Roadmap

• Publish initial version

[] Add missing documentation (crud endpoints,

[] Wrap useInfiniteQuery

[] Add tests

[] Much more ?

See the open issues for a full list of proposed features (and known issues).

Contributing

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion that would make this better, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag “enhancement”.

Don’t forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!

1. Fork the Project

2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)

3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')

4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)

5. Open a Pull Request

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

Contact

Your Name Apperside – https://apperside.com – info@apperside.com

Project Link: https://github.com/apperside/react-query-typed-api

GitHub

View Github