如何在不键入TypeScript的情况下处理供应商？

Question

I'm thinking about switching from native JS to TS for an application I'm developing. I've created a new branch to test things - Typescript itself seems to be fine for it, but there's one major problem I'm facing: some vendors I'm using do not have any or just outdated definition files.

The question now is: how to handle missing defintion files?

I could do something like

declare var sails: any;

but is this really a good idea?

Answer 1

declare var sails: any;

Is a hack. It's good to get yourself going, or to let you try a library to see if it will actually work, but your best bet is to be explicit. (Any time you have : any in your project, it should be a red flag that you need to fix something - but realistically almost everyone has an any or two (or more) floating around). That being said: something as big as sails should not be an any .

So, what can you do?

Look on DefinitelyTyped

If you are using Typescript 2, you can install most of the definitions from definitely typed with npm via

npm i -g @types/thing-you-want

(unfortunately, it doesn't look like Sails is on DefinitelyTyped)

You can also try googling to see if anyone else has written a definition file that's not on definitely typed but that still works.

Be prepared though, even definitely typed is not guaranteed to be correct and may need massaging.

Write your definitions as you need them

This may be what you are up against. This is certainly not as thorough, but it will usually get you where you need to go. Look up the documentation for the portion of the API you need and add those definitions to your .d.ts file.

If you go about it this way, it's less overwhelming and you can contribute your work to DefintielyTyped when you are finished if you are so inclined :).