json files should be usable in .d.ts files without breaking things

Search Terms

resolveJsonModule import definition

Suggestion

As a .json file is a static resource, it should be able to be referenced in a global.d.ts file for example without that file being automatically treated as a module. The reason for this is that a .json file may be used to simply enforce valid translation keys, and you shouldn’t need to suck the whole .json file into the transpilation process to do that.

Use Cases

Example:

import translations from "../assets/translations/en-AU.json"
type $translate = {
    instant: (translationKey: keyof typeof translations) => string,
    use: Function,
    proposedLanguage: Function
}

The downside of the current method again is that the translations file is output in the transpilation process, which is wasteful if the file is large.

What the above code snippet is trying to achieve, should be allowed in a .d.ts file without breaking global declaration functionality.

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• This wouldn’t be a breaking change in existing TypeScript / JavaScript code
• This wouldn’t change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn’t a runtime feature (e.g. new expression-level syntax)

[AlCalzone]

I just ran into the same issue. Given the following directory structure:

build/  - The compiler output ends up here
src/    - The sources reside here
  file1.ts
  file2.ts
  ... and so on
somejsonfile.json - The file I'm trying to include. It is guaranteed to be there in the final module

Compiling the source code results in this structure if I don’t reference somejsonfile.json from source code:

build/  - The compiler output ends up here
  file1.js
  file1.d.ts
  ... and so on
src/    - The sources reside here
  file1.ts
  file2.ts
  ... and so on
somejsonfile.json - The file I'm trying to include. It is guaranteed to be there in the final module

If I do import from somejsonfile.json, instead of just compiling from src to build, the structure is shifted:

build/  - The compiler output ends up here
  src/  - This is extraneous!
    file1.js
    file1.d.ts
    ... and so on
  somejsonfile.json  - This is just copied from the root dir.
src/    - The sources reside here
  file1.ts
  file2.ts
  ... and so on
somejsonfile.json

which results in duplication of the json file and an unnecessary src directory inside build.

Unfortunately, this means that resolveJsonModule is unusable for what I’m trying to do - that is reading strongly typed config data from a json file.

@mhegazy Is this the kind of feedback you’re looking for?

[noelelias]

How about another parameter. “compileJsonModule”:true|false Current code would still work and for future implementations devs would have the option to keep the strucutre.