TypeContractor 0.15.0

TypeContractor

Looks at one or more assemblies containing contracts and translates to TypeScript interfaces and enums

Goals

1. Take one or more assemblies and reflect to find relevant types and their dependencies that should get a TypeScript definition published.

2. Perform replacements on the names to strip away prefixes

   MyCompany.SystemName.Common is unnecessary to have in the output path. We can strip the common prefix and get api/Modules/MyModule/SomeRequest.ts instead of api/MyCompany/SystemName/Common/Modules/MyModule/SomeRequest.ts.

3. Map custom types to their TypeScript-friendly counterparts if necessary.

   For example, say your system has a custom Money type that maps down to number. If we don't configure that manually, it will create the Money interface, which only contains amount as a number. That's both cumbersome to work with, as well as wrong, since the serialization will (most likely) serialize Money as a number.

4. Help validate responses from the API

   Regular response.json() returns any, which means that any return type we specify ourselves are just wishful thinking. It might match, it might differ a bit, or it can differ a lot. Using Zod, we generate schemas automatically that can be used for validating the response and knowing that we get the correct data back.

5. Automatically generate API clients based on the controller endpoints.

   Why bother creating a TypeScript API client where you have to manually keep routes, parameters and everything in sync? We have the data, we have the types, we have the schemas. Let's just make everything work together, and let TypeContractor handle keeping those pesky API changes in sync.

Setup and configuration

To accomplish the same configuration and results as described under Goals, create Contractor like this:

Contractor.FromDefaultConfiguration(configuration => configuration
            .AddAssembly("MyCompany.SystemName.Common", "MyCompany.SystemName.Common.dll")
            .AddCustomMap("MyCompany.SystemName.Common.Types.Money", DestinationTypes.Number)
            .StripString("MyCompany.SystemName.Common")
            .SetOutputDirectory(Path.Combine(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), "api")));

Configuration file

It's possible to create a configuration file and provide all the same options via a file instead of command line arguments.

Create a file called typecontractor.config in the same or a parent directory from where you run TypeContractor from. We use dotnet-config for parsing the files (written in TOML), so it's possible to inherit from parent directories, a user-wide configuration or a system-wide configuration. Or have a repository-specific configuration that can be overridden inside the repo with typecontractor.config.user. You can edit the file manually or install the dotnet-config tool for viewing and changing configuration similar to how git config works.

Example configuration file

[typecontractor]
    # backslashes must be escaped
    assembly = "bin\\Debug\\net8.0\\MyCompany.SystemName.dll"
    output = "api"
    strip = "MyCompany"
    replace = "MyCompany.Common:CommonFiles" # Options can repeat
    replace = "ThirdParty.Http:Http"
    root = "~/api"
    generate-api-clients = true
    build-zod-schemas = true

Run manually

Get an instance of Contractor and call contractor.Build();

Integrate with ASP.NET Core

The easiest way is to TypeContractor, using dotnet tool install --global typecontractor. This adds typecontractor as an executable installed on the system and always available.

Run typecontractor to get a list of available options.

This tool reflects over the main assembly provided and finds all controllers (that inherits from Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.ControllerBase). Each controller is reflected over in turn, and finds all public methods that returns ActionResult<T>. The ActionResult<T> is unwrapped and the inner type T is added to a list of candidates.

Additionally, the public methods returning an ActionResult<T> or a plain ActionResult will have their parameters analyzed as well. Anything that's not a builtin type will be added to the list of candidates.

Meaning if you have a method looking like:

public async Task<ActionResult> Create([FromBody] CreateObjectDto request, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
   ...
}

we will add CreateObjectDto to the list of candidates. System.Threading.CancellationToken is a builtin type (currently, this means it is defined inside System.) and will be ignored. Same with other basic types such as int, Guid, IEnumerable<T> and so on.

For each candidate, we apply stripping and replacements and custom mappings and write everything to the output files.

Installing locally

Instead of installing the tool globally, you can also add it locally to the project that is going to use it. This makes it easier to make sure everyone who wants to run the project have it available.

For the initial setup, run:

dotnet new tool-manifest dotnet tool install typecontractor

in your Web-project.

Whenever new users check out the repository, they can run dotnet tool restore and get everything you need installed.

Running automatically

In your Web.csproj add a target that calls the tool after build. Example:

<Target Name="GenerateTypes" AfterTargets="Build">
  <Message Importance="high" Text="Running in CI, not generating new types" Condition="'$(AGENT_ID)' != ''" />
  <Message Importance="high" Text="Generating API types" Condition="'$(AGENT_ID)' == ''" />
  <Exec 
      Condition="'$(AGENT_ID)' == ''"
      ContinueOnError="true"
      Command="typecontractor --assembly $(OutputPath)$(AssemblyName).dll --output $(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)\App\src\api --clean smart --replace My.Web.App.src.modules:App --replace Infrastructure.Common:Common --strip MyCompany" />
  <Message Importance="high" Text="Finished generating API types" Condition="'$(AGENT_ID)' == ''" />
</Target>

This will only run in non-CI environments (tested on Azure DevOps). Adjust the environment variable as needed. You don't want new types to be generated on the build machine, that should use whatever existed when the developer did their thing.

It will first:

1. Strip out MyCompany. from the beginning of namespaces
2. Replace My.Web.App.src.modules with App
3. Replace Infrastructure.Common with Common

by looking at the configured assembly. The resulting files are placed in Web\App\src\api.

When running with --clean smart, which is the default, it first generates the updated or newly created files. After that, it looks in the output directory and removes every file and directory that are no longer needed.

Other options are:

• none -- which as the name suggests, does no cleanup at all. That part is left as an exercise to the user.
• remove -- which removes the entire output directory before starting the file generation. This is probably the quickest, but some tools that are watching for changes does not always react so well to having files suddenly disappear and reappear.

Integration with Zod

An experimental option to generate Zod schemas exists behind the --build-zod-schemas flag. This causes each generated TypeScript file to also have a <TypeName>Schema generated that can be integrated with Zod. Currently no support for validations, but that might come in a future update.

Example:

public class PaymentsPerYearResponse
{
    public IEnumerable<int> Years { get; set; } = [2023, 2024];
    public Dictionary<int, int> PaymentsPerYear { get; set; } = new Dictionary<int, int>
    {
        { 2024, 4 },
        { 2023, 12 }
    };
}

generates

import { z } from 'zod';

export interface PaymentsPerYearResponse {
  years: number[];
  paymentsPerYear: { [key: number]: number };
}

export const PaymentsPerYearResponseSchema = z.object({
  years: z.array(z.number()),
  paymentsPerYear: z.record(z.string(), z.number()), // JavaScript is very stringy (https://zod.dev/?id=records)
});

and can be integrated using something similar to

const response = await this.http.fetch('api/paymentsPerYear', { signal: cancellationToken });
const input = await response.json();
return PaymentsPerYearResponseSchema.parse(input);

which will throw a ZodError if input fails to parse against the schema. Otherwise it returns a cleaned up version of input.

Automatic API client generation

By running TypeContractor with the --generate-api-clients flag, every controller found will have an automatic client generated for each of the discovered endpoints.

Should be combined with the --root flag for generating nice imports. For example --root "~/api" if you are writing files to api and have ~ defined as an alias in your bundler.

If Zod integration is enabled, the return type for each API call will be automatically validated against the schema. If so, it expects the Response prototype to be extended with a parseJson method. An example implementation can be found in tools/response.ts.

To provide a custom template instead of using the built-in Aurelia one, provide --api-client-template with the path to a Handlebars template that does what you want. The available data model can be found in TypeContractor/Templates/ApiClientTemplateDto.cs and an example template is TypeContractor/Templates/aurelia.hbs.

Since the name is just the controller name with Controller replaced with Client, collisions between controllers with the same name but different namespaces are possible. If this happens, the first controller found gets to keep the original name and TypeContractor will prefix the colliding client with the last part of its namespace. So for example:

ExampleApp.Controllers.DataController turns into DataClient, while ExampleApp.Controllers.Subsystem.DataController collides and gets turned into SubsystemDataClient.

Further customization using Annotations

To further customize the output of TypeContractor, you can install the optional package TypeContractor.Annotations and start annotating your controllers.

Available annotations:

• TypeContractorIgnore: If you have a controller that doesn't need a client generated, you can annotate that controller using TypeContractorIgnore and it will be automatically skipped.

• TypeContractorName: If you have a badly named controller that you can't rename, you want something custom, or just don't like the default naming scheme, you can apply this attribute to select a brand new name.

  If you have multiple endpoints with the same name and different parameters, C# handles the overloads perfectly, but not so much in TypeScript. Use TypeContractorName to rename a single endpoint to whatever fits.

• TypeContractorNullable: If your project doesn't support nullable reference types, or you just feel like you know better, you can mark a property as nullable and override the automatically detected setting.

Future improvements

• Kebab-case output files and directories
• Better documentation
• Better performance -- if this should run on build, it can't take forever
• Possible to add types to exclude?
• Improve method for finding AspNetCore framework DLLs
  • Possible to provide a manual path, so not a priority
• Work with Hot Reload?