diff-view-lite

Human-readable JSON object diffing for audit-trail UIs — deep diff between two objects, returned as flat field-level changes with dotted paths, ready to render as "who changed what."

Install

npm install diff-view-lite

Quick start

import { diffObjects, formatChanges } from 'diff-view-lite';

const changes = diffObjects(previousRecord, updatedRecord);
console.log(formatChanges(changes));
// [ 'status: "draft" -> "published"', '+ reviewer: "alice"' ]

Why arrays are atomic

Diffing arrays element-by-element (detecting insertions, deletions, reorders) is a much harder problem — LCS-based sequence diffing — and the result is often harder to read in an audit log than "tags changed from [...] to [...]" would be. diff-view-lite treats a changed array as a single field change rather than attempting an element-level diff, which keeps output predictable and matches what "reviewing an edit history" usually needs: did this field change, and to what.

API

• diffObjects(from, to) — returns a FieldChange[]: { type: 'added' | 'removed' | 'changed', path, value | from/to }
• formatChanges(changes) — human-readable lines per change
• hasChanges(changes) — convenience boolean check

Nested plain objects are diffed recursively with dotted paths (user.address.city); arrays and primitives are compared as whole values.

License

MIT