How to create a Partial-like that requires a single property to be set

Question

We have a structure that is like the following:

export type LinkRestSource = {
    model: string;
    rel?: string;
    title?: string;
} | {
    model?: string;
    rel: string;
    title?: string;
} | {
    model?: string;
    rel?: string;
    title: string;
};

Which is almost the same as saying

type LinkRestSource = Partial<{model: string, rel: string, title: string}>

Except that the Partial will allow an empty object to be passed in whereas the initial type requires one of the properties to be passed in.

How can I create a generic like Partial, but that behaves like my structure above?

Answer 1

You're looking for something that takes a type T and produces a related type which contains at least one property from T. It's like Partial<T>, but excludes the empty object.

If so, here it is:

type AtLeastOne<T, U = {[K in keyof T]: Pick<T, K> }> = Partial<T> & U[keyof U]

To dissect it, first of all:

• AtLeastOne<T> is Partial<T> intersected with something.
• U[keyof U] means that it's the union of all property values of U.
• And I've defined the default value of U to be a mapped type where each property of T is mapped to Pick<T, K>, a single-property type for the key K.

For example, the following is equivalent because it "picks" the 'foo' property from the original type:

Pick<{foo: string, bar: number},'foo'>
// is equivalent to 
{foo: string}

meaning that U[keyof U] in this case is the union of all possible single-property types from T. Let's see step-by-step how it operates on the following concrete type:

type FullLinkRestSource = {
  model: string;
  rel: string;
  title: string;
}

type LinkRestSource = AtLeastOne<FullLinkRestSource>

which expands to:

type LinkRestSource = AtLeastOne<FullLinkRestSource, {
  [K in keyof FullLinkRestSource]: Pick<FullLinkRestSource, K>
}>

or

type LinkRestSource = AtLeastOne<FullLinkRestSource, {
  model: Pick<FullLinkRestSource, 'model'>,
  rel: Pick<FullLinkRestSource, 'rel'>,
  title: Pick<FullLinkRestSource, 'title'>
}>

or

type LinkRestSource = AtLeastOne<FullLinkRestSource, {
  model: {model: string},
  rel: {rel: string},
  title: {title: string}>
}>

or

type LinkRestSource = Partial<FullLinkRestSource> & {
  model: {model: string},
  rel: {rel: string},
  title: {title: string}>
}[keyof {
  model: {model: string},
  rel: {rel: string},
  title: {title: string}>
}]

or

type LinkRestSource = Partial<FullLinkRestSource> & {
  model: {model: string},
  rel: {rel: string},
  title: {title: string}>
}['model' | 'rel' | 'title']

or

type LinkRestSource = Partial<FullLinkRestSource> &
  ({model: string} | {rel: string} | {title: string})

or

type LinkRestSource = {model?: string, rel?: string, title?: string} & 
  ({model: string} | {rel: string} | {title: string})

or

type LinkRestSource = { model: string, rel?: string, title?: string } 
  | {model?: string, rel: string, title?: string} 
  | {model?: string, rel?: string, title: string}

which is, I think, what you want.

You can test it out:

const okay0: LinkRestSource = { model: 'a', rel: 'b', title: 'c' }
const okay1: LinkRestSource = { model: 'a', rel: 'b' }
const okay2: LinkRestSource = { model: 'a' }
const okay3: LinkRestSource = { rel: 'b' }
const okay4: LinkRestSource = { title: 'c' }

const error0: LinkRestSource = {} // missing property
const error1: LinkRestSource = { model: 'a', titel: 'c' } // excess property on string literal