Super Cereal 🥣

Serialize any in-memory object graph into key/value pair storage. Deserialize from any object in the structure.

Supports the following property types:

• Primitive
• Class (must extend Model)
• Object (with circular refs)
• 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);

const jimId = jim.save();
const freshJim = store.load(jimId) as Person;

console.log(freshJim.friends);

const steve = new Person("Steve");
freshJim.addFriend(steve);

console.log(freshJim.friends);

The Al-Gore-ithm does a depth-first-search, 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 make your 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.

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, just extend from Model and call super(store, arguments) in constructors. 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).