Deep Cloning Objects in Angular, Typescript, Javascript

Some of the techniques for cloning objects in Javascript are either using object destructuring or a combination of JSON.stringify() and JSON.parse().

const objectA = { foo: { bar: 'baz' } }; // initial value of objectA
const cloneOfObjectA = {...objectA}; // objectA destructured to create cloneOfObjectA

const objectB = { foo: { bar: 'baz' } }; // initial value of objectB
const cloneOfObjectB = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(objectB)); // create a clone of objectB using JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify()

Each of the above methods has limitations if you’re looking to deep clone your object.

Object destructuring with the spread operator (i.e. Object.assign) for objects const a = {...b} only makes shallow copies of those objects, meanwhile using the JSON methods will dump the prototype chain and any methods on the object (more here).

I am currently taking the Angular Architecture and Best Practices course on Pluralsight and @DanWahlin (it’s author) mentions a really cool and lightweight library for achieving just this: clone.

It offers foolproof deep cloning of objects, arrays, numbers, strings, maps, sets, promises, etc. in JavaScript, has 0 dependencies and at the time of writing has over 607M downloads!

To install it, simple run npm install clone, just follow the readme for more usage notes 🙂.

Here’s a wrapper service for the library when using with Angular and Typescript:

import {Injectable} from '@angular/core';
import * as clone from 'clone';

@Injectable({providedIn: 'root'})
export class ClonerService {

    deepClone<T>(value): T {
        return clone<T>(value);
    }

}

And a (quite trivial) usage example:

    const objectA = { foo: { bar: 'baz' } }; // initial value of objectA
    constructor(private clonerService: ClonerService) {
        const cloneOfObjectA = this.clonerService.deepClone(this.objectA);
    }

Hopefully this helps in your deep cloning adventures, happy coding!