Optional Properties

Not all properties of an interface may be required. Some exist under certain conditions or may not be there at all. These optional properties are popular when creating patterns like “option bags” where you pass an object to a function that only has a couple of properties filled in.

Here’s an example of this pattern:

interface SquareConfig {
  color?: string;
  width?: number;
}

function createSquare(config: SquareConfig): {color: string; area: number} {
  let newSquare = {color: "white", area: 100};
  if (config.color) {
    newSquare.color = config.color;
  }
  if (config.width) {
    newSquare.area = config.width * config.width;
  }
  return newSquare;
}

let mySquare = createSquare({color: "black"});

Interfaces with optional properties are written similar to other interfaces, with each optional property denoted by a ? at the end of the property name in the declaration.

The advantage of optional properties is that you can describe these possibly available properties while still also preventing use of properties that are not part of the interface. For example, had we mistyped the name of the color property in createSquare, we would get an error message letting us know:

interface SquareConfig {
  color?: string;
  width?: number;
}

function createSquare(config: SquareConfig): { color: string; area: number } {
  let newSquare = {color: "white", area: 100};
  if (config.color) {
    // Error: Property 'collor' does not exist on type 'SquareConfig'
    newSquare.color = config.collor;
  }
  if (config.width) {
    newSquare.area = config.width * config.width;
  }
  return newSquare;
}

let mySquare = createSquare({color: "black"});

Links:

https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/interfaces.html#optional-properties

doc_TypeScript

2016-10-04 19:25:28

Comments