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jsontypescripttsconfig

Purpose of "resolveJsonModule"?

The setting I am referencing is shown in the snippet bellow

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
  }
}

I don't really understand why TS language engineers would add a flag for "resolveJsonModule"? Either an environment supports resolving JSON as module via an import statement (or require() method), or the environment doesn't. Why bother with the extra complexity?


Solution

  • Context

    Historically, Node has included a specialized JSON loader (unrelated to ECMA standards) to allow importing JSON data only in CommonJS mode.

    Standardized importing of anything at all (ES modules) is only a relatively recent phenomenon in ECMAScript. Importing text files containing valid JSON, parsed as native JS data ("importing JSON") is described in a proposal that is still only in stage 3.

    However, there has been recent movement in regard to implementation of the above mentioned proposal:

    TypeScript

    TypeScript is a static type-checker, but also a compiler (technically a transpiler), and transforms your TS source code syntax into a syntax that is valid JavaScript for the runtime environment you have specified in your TSConfig. Because there are different runtime environments with different capabilities, the way that you configure the compiler affects the transformed JavaScript that is emitted. In regard to defaults, the compiler uses an algorithmic logic to determine settings. (I can't summarize that here: you honestly have to read the entire reference in order to understand it.) Because loading of JSON data has been a non-standard, specialized operation until extremely recently, it has not been a default.

    Alternatives

    All JS runtimes offer alternatives to an import statment for importing of textual JSON data (which can then be parsed using JSON.parse), and none of them require configuring the compiler in the ways that you asked about:

    Note: the data parsed from the JSON strings imported using these methods will not participate in the "automatic" type inference capabilities of the compiler module graph because they aren't part of the compilation graph: so they'll be typed as any (or possibly unknown in an extremely strict configuration).

    Additionally, because all JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is valid JS, you can simply prepend the data in your JSON file with export default , and then save the file as data.js instead of data.json, and then import it as a standard module: import { default as data } from "./data.js";.

    Final notes about inferred types:

    I prefer to audit the JSON that I'm importing and use my own manually-written types (written either by myself or someone else: imported from a module/declaration file) for the data, rather than relying on the compiler's inferred types from import statements (which I have found to be too narrow on many occasions), by assigning the parsed JSON data to a new variable using a type assertion.