🏯 Stack

A library to create type-safe readonly stacks

Example

import { Key, Stack } from '@dldc/stack';

// 1. Create a key with a name and a type
const NumKey = Key.create<number>('Num');

// 2. Create a stack
const stack = new Stack();

// 3. Add a value to the stack using the key (Stack is immutable, it returns a new instance)
const stack2 = stack.with(NumKey.Provider(42));

// 4. Get the value from the stack using the key
expect(stack2.get(NumKey.Consumer)).toBe(42);

Installation

npm install @dldc/stack
# or
yarn add @dldc/stack

Usage

Defining a Key

To write a value to a stack, you need to create a Key with a name and a type.

const NumKey = Key.create<number>('Num');

A key is a object with two properties:

• Provider: a function used to write a value to a stack
• Consumer: an object used to read a value from a stack

You can also create an empty key that will not have a value:

const EmptyKey = Key.createEmpty('Empty');

Finally you ca define a default value for a key:

const NumKey = Key.createWithDefault<number>('Num', 42);

This key will always return a value if you try to get it from a stack (either the value that was set or the default value).

Creating a Stack

To create a new empty stack you can instantiate a new Stack:

const stack = new Stack();

Note: Do not pass any argument to the constructor !

Writing to a Stack

To write a value to a stack, you need to use the Provider of a key and pass it's result to the with() method of your Stack instance.

const stack2 = stack.with(NumKey.Provider(42));

The with() method will return a new instance of Stack with the new value. The original stack is not modified.

Note: You cannot remove a value from a stack, you can only override it with a new value.

You can pass multiple providers to the with() method:

const stack2 = stack.with(NumKey.Provider(42), EmptyKey.Provider());

Reading from a Stack

To read a value from a stack, you need to use the Consumer of a key and pass it to get() method of your Stack instance.

const value = stack.get(NumKey.Consumer);

This will return the value that was set using the Provider of the key or undefined if no value was setand the key does not have a default value.

If you expect the Key to be defined you can use the getOrFail() method:

const value = stack.getOrFail(NumKey.Consumer);

If the key does not have a default value and no value was set, this will throw a MissingContextError error.

If you only want to know if a value was set, you can use the has() method:

const hasValue = stack.has(NumKey.Consumer);

This will return true if a value was set using the Provider.

Debugging a Stack

To inspect the content of a stack, you can use the inspect() method. It will return a string representation of the stack.

Note: The toString() of a Stack will always return Stack { ... }, if you want to inspect the content of a stack, you need to use the inspect() method.

Customizing the inspect() method

By default the inspect() method will print a serialized version of the values contained in the stack. You can customize this behavior by provising a serailize function as the last argument of Key.create(), Key.createEmpty() or Key.createWithDefault().

const NumKey = Key.create<number>('Num', (value) => value.toFixed(2));

const stack = new Stack().with(NumKey.Provider(42));
console.log(stack.inspect());
// Stack { Num: 42.00 }

Extending Stack (advanced)

You can create your own Stack, this is useful to define custom properties and methods.

class CustomStack extends Stack {
  // You need to override the `instantiate` method to return a new instance of your CustomStack
  protected instantiate(stackCore: StackCoreValue): this {
    return new CustomStack(stackCore) as any;
  }
}

const custom = new CustomStack();
expect(custom instanceof CustomStack).toBe(true);
expect(custom instanceof Stack).toBe(true);

For more advanced use cases, see the definition of ZenContext in @dldc.serve