Typescript: No Index Signature

I have been spending some free time dabbling in Typescript.

One thing recently caught me off guard. I had a simple object which looks like this:

const unitsOfTime = {
  millisecond: 1,
  second: 60,
  hour: 60 * 60,
  day: 24 * 60 * 60,
  month: 30 * 24 * 60 * 60,
  year: 365 * 24 * 60 * 60
}

In my initial testing, I was using it like this: unitsOfTime.day and all was well. However, once I switch to something a bit more dynamic (unitsOfTime[someParameter]) the Typescript compiler started to complain about a missing index signature.

After a brief search, I was led to this PR¹.

With this PR an object literal type is assignable to a type with an index signature if all known properties in the object literal are assignable to that index signature. This makes it possible to pass a variable that was initialized with an object literal as a parameter to a function that expects a map or dictionary

In hindsight this makes sense. There is no guarantee this dictionary is going to return a number at this key².

The fix is to supply a type signature to the dictionary: {[unit: string] : number}

Here is the full object:

const unitsOfTime : {[unit: string] : number} = {
  millisecond: 1,
  second: 60,
  hour: 60 * 60,
  day: 24 * 60 * 60,
  month: 30 * 24 * 60 * 60,
  year: 365 * 24 * 60 * 60
  }

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1. By Anders Hejlsberg! I have been out of the Microsoft ecosystem for quite a while, so it still blows my mind to see this both on Github and PR’s by Anders himself. ↩

2. This is much more interesting for a function that receives a dictionary as a parameter (as is in the PR description). In this specific case, it helps to call out what is expected, but it still does not guarantee unitsOfTime always returns a number (it could still return a null if the key is missing. Still, it is a step in the right direction. ↩