Entity Walker

Entity Walker is a zero-dependency, type-safe TypeScript graph library for navigating relational data through intuitive traversal chains.

Model your data as a graph of entities connected by foreign keys, then traverse relationships with full TypeScript autocomplete — forward and reverse — as if you were walking through your data.

Core Idea

Instead of writing nested loops or manual joins:

transactions.map(t =>
  subcategories.find(s =>
    mainCategories.find(m => ...)
  )
)

You simply walk the graph:

graph.transaction("tx1")
  .subcategory()
  .mainCategory()
  .value()?.name

What You Can Use It For

• Read-heavy data models (dashboards, analytics, finance apps)

• Normalized API data (client-side joins without nesting)

• Deep entity navigation (multi-hop relationships)

• Reverse lookups (find all entities pointing to another)

• Data integrity validation

• In-memory graph exploration

• Rich node-list API — .where(), .whereNode(), .ids(), .entities(), .select(), .unique(), .intersect(), .findEntity(), .findNode(), .isEmpty() and more work directly on related entity collections.

• Scoped Traversal — Use .scoped() to snapshot the current state of a traversal, ensuring filters from earlier steps persist across deep path jumps.

• Functional Encapsulation — Use .with() to return values or encapsulated intersections seamlessly from within a traversal chain.

• Consistent defaults — every node exposes .value() (safe, returns undefined when missing) and .valueOrThrow() (throws when missing). No split between optional and required at the type level.

• Performance-friendly — indexed O(1) lookups; even rebuilding the graph per query beats nested loops at scale.

• Proxy-free alternative — createNonProxyGraph produces an equivalent graph for environments without Proxy support.

• Safe Initialization — Optional emptyNode and emptyNodeList factories for robust proxy-based initialization.

• Data integrity checks — graph.info() detects missing FK targets and orphan entities at runtime.

Installation

npm install entity-walker

Quick Example

import { createGraph, ValidSchema, GraphEdges, GraphDef, Entities, EntityGraph } from "entity-walker";

type Transaction  = { id: string; subcategoryId: string };
type Subcategory  = { id: string; name: string; mainCategoryId: string };
type MainCategory = { id: string; name: string; expenseTypeId?: string };

type Schema = ValidSchema<{
  transaction:  Transaction;
  subcategory:  Subcategory;
  mainCategory: MainCategory;
}>;

const edges = {
  transaction: {
    subcategory: { bidirectional: true, resolve: t => t.subcategoryId },
  },
  subcategory: {
    mainCategory: { bidirectional: true, resolve: s => s.mainCategoryId },
  },
} as const satisfies GraphEdges<Schema>;

type CustomGraph = GraphDef<Schema, typeof edges>;

const entities: Entities<Schema> = {
  transaction:  [{ id: "tx1", subcategoryId: "sub1" }],
  subcategory:  [{ id: "sub1", name: "Groceries", mainCategoryId: "cat1" }],
  mainCategory: [{ id: "cat1", name: "Food" }],
};

const graph: EntityGraph<CustomGraph> = createGraph({ entities, edges });

// Forward traversal
const categoryName = graph
  .transaction("tx1")
  .subcategory()
  .mainCategory()
  .value()?.name; // "Food"

// Reverse traversal
const txIds = graph
  .mainCategory("cat1")
  .subcategoryNodes()
  .transactionNodes()
  .ids(); // ["tx1"]

Detailed Guides

| Guide | Description | |---|---| | Graph | Full reference for createGraph — the standard API with clean graph.entity("id") / node.relation() syntax powered by Proxy. | | Non-Proxy Graph | Full reference for createNonProxyGraph — identical behaviour using a .to() calling convention, compatible with environments that do not support Proxy. | | Graph Modification | Update (upsert), node-level field update, delete, and cascade-delete entities at runtime with automatic index maintenance. | | Debugging | Use graph.info() to inspect entity counts, missing FK targets, and orphan entities. |

Performance & Benchmarks

Entity Walker builds an in-memory index at construction time so every lookup is O(1). Even with several rebuilding the graph out-performs hand-written nested loops at scale:

The benchmark compares pure indexed for loops against Entity Walker (with Proxy and without Proxy) across increasing dataset sizes with random id access patterns on multi-hop (4 relations). Entity Walker's indexed lookups dominate as dataset size grows. Proxy vs non-Proxy performance differs by a small constant factor, but both are much faster than nested loops at scale. The non-Proxy version is faster than Proxy (average ~1ms faster), but the difference is negligible compared to the gap with nested loops.