Let developers to call JS methods on limited JS objects

Is your feature request related to a problem? If yes, please describe the problem.

It would be great if we could pass over some libraries - take the lodash to AskQL and let the developers use all the functions provided, without the need to pack every call with a painstakingly created resource (current case). It could be pretty much useful for using the external services APIs like commercetools sdk or ORMs generated from tools like Prisma

To keep it safe we can let call just the top-level functions, or add whitelisting + only on the explicitly passed resources like:

const vmContext = { 
customResources:  [ 
 "lodash": jsModuleInterop(_, ["sort", "unique"])
]

where the jsModuleInterop is a wrapper over the JS object accepting the object (in this case _ - lodash module, plus a whitelist of methods)

[mhagmajer]

@pkarw seems like this can be done in user space with a resource factory that accepts an object, for example:

  function myResourceFactory(module) {
    const res = {}
    Object.keys(module).forEach((k) => {
      res[k] = resource({
        type: any,
        async resolver(...args: any) {
          return module[k](...args);
        },
      });
    });
    return res;
  }

  const result = await askql.runUntyped(
    {
      resources: {
        ...myResourceFactory(lodash),
        ...askql.resources,
      }
    },
    askql.parse("ask { 'hello world!' }")
  );

The design decision with AskQL was to have a separate computing environment from JavaScript (or any other host programming language) and therefore it would be troublesome to do a direct linking. All callable host methods would need to go through an explicit wrapper which allows for security measures. With the method above it perhaps becomes easier to add multiple resources at the same time.

Although, for full support of what you’re asking for with namespaces would need to solve https://github.com/CatchTheTornado/askql/issues/579 first.

[pkarw]

Perfect fit @mhagmajer. Thanks!