Super Cereal 🥣

A super serial-izer that can turn any in-memory object graph into key/value string pairs (and back again)!

Supports the following objects/types:

• All primitive values (string, number, bool, etc)
• Classes and inherited classes (base class must extend Model)
• Object (with circular refs)
• Response
• Array
• Function
• Map
• Set
• Map
• Date

TL;DR: You get to keep your lovely graph structure and all of your lovely class methods too.

But how?

import { Store, Model } from "./mod.ts";

const storeObj: Record<string, string> = {};

const store = new Store({
  get: (id: string) => storeObj[id],
  set: (id: string, value: string) => storeObj[id] = value
});

class Person extends Model {
  name: string;
  friends: Person[] = [];

  constructor(name: string) {
    super(store, arguments);
    this.name = name;
  }

  addFriend(friend: Person) {
    this.friends.push(friend);
    friend.friends.push(this);
  }
}

const jim = new Person("Jim");
const bob = new Person("Bob");
jim.addFriend(bob);

// jim now has a circular reference via bob - no problem!
const jimId = jim.save();
const freshJim = store.load(jimId) as Person;

console.log(freshJim.friends);

const steve = new Person("Steve");

// class methods retained
freshJim.addFriend(steve);

console.log(freshJim.friends);

The Al-Gore-ithm does a depth-first-search through the object structure leaving unique IDs on non-primitive values. It then serializes and stores objects by ID, replacing all refs with the corresponding ID to “unlink” the structure so it never gets stuck in a circular reference loop.

First instantiate a Store then simply pass objects into its save method. If you want to serialize your own classes, make sure your base classes extend Model and call super(store, arguments) in their constuctors. This allows the store to reinstantiate them with their initial arguments before using Object.assign to apply deserialized property values.

Note: Classes that extend Model inherit the save method so you can call it directly from them!

But why?

I wanted a tool that could serialize any in-memory data structure with classes and store it in a key-value store. This allows for browser-based storage of OOP software state that can extend to the edge/cloud.

The goal was to require minimal additional class boilerplate and I think this fits the bill nicely. The only caveat is that you have use store.load(id) as Classname to keep accurate TS syntax highlighting (there is currently no way for TS to infer this and generic types don’t work with nested structures).