Flow Schema

Flow Schema is a fast runtime schema validation library for Flow.

Motivation

Javascript excels at interacting with external datas sources (APIs, Databases, files, etc). However, validating incoming data that is any typed challenges our type system. Instead of using a value blindly, we want to validate that a value is typed as we expect.

Although there are plenty of Javascript object schema validation libraries like Joi and ajv, most do not validate objects to their proper Flow type.

Flow Schema provides a simple API to construct type schemas that can be used to synchronously validate the types of untrusted objects to their proper Flow type. If validation fails, Flow Schema will throw a ValidationError with a descriptive error message. This allows Flow Schema to be used in a try {} catch (error) {} block

API Documentation

See the full API documentation here.

Example

Simple

// Success
const success = Flow.string.validate('success');

// Error
const oops = Flow.string.validate(123);

/*
  Error: ValidationError

  Expected: string
  Received: 123 (Number)
*/

Advanced

// @flow

import { Flow } from 'flow-schema';

// Define Login type and schema
type Login =
  | string
  | {
      ip: string,
      attempt: number | null,
    };

const LoginSchema = Flow.union(
  Flow.string,
  Flow.Object({
    ip: Flow.string,
    attempt: Flow.number.nullable,
  })
);

// Define User type and schema
type User = {
  name: string,
  birthday: Date,
  email: string,
  logins: Array<Login>,
};

const UserSchema = Flow.Object({
  name: Flow.string,
  birthday: Flow.Date,
  email: Flow.string,
  logins: Flow.Array(LoginSchema),
});

// Get some API Data
const apiJSON = '{"name":"Charlie","birthday":"1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","email":"[email protected]","logins":["192.168.1.0",{"ip":"8.8.8.8","attempt":null},{"ip":"8.8.4.4","attempt":2}]}';
const apiData = JSON.parse(apiJSON);

try {
  // Validate the apiData
  const user = UserSchema.validate(apiData);

  // Use the data with confidence
  (user: User);
} catch (error) {
  // Rethrow if the error is not a ValidationError
  if (!(error instanceof Flow.ValidationError)) throw error;

  // Handle the Validation Error
  Sentry.catchException(new Error('This was not suppossed to happen'));
}