BREAKING CHANGE: cereale moves from legacy `experimentalDecorators` to TC39
standard decorators, which is what makes validation rules type-checked against
the fields they are attached to.
class User {
@IsString() name!: string; // fine
@IsString() age!: number; // Type 'number' is not assignable to 'string'
}
Legacy decorators receive (target: any, key: string) and lose the field type
entirely, so this was impossible in v1. Standard decorators receive
ClassFieldDecoratorContext<This, Value>, which carries it. Rules now checked:
scalar rules against scalar fields; { each: true } against arrays, in both
directions; @JsonType against the field's class; @JsonSerialize/@JsonDeserialize
against the field's type; @IsIn and @IsEnum against the field's value type.
17 tests invoke the real compiler to assert the wrong code stays rejected — a
guarantee nobody checks is one that quietly stops holding.
Positioning follows the capability: validated domain objects, not validated
data. The README now leads with the Zod comparison. Cereale does not infer your
type from a schema — you still write the field type and the rule — but it
guarantees the two cannot disagree, which is what class-validator never offered.
Removed
- metadata-storage.ts and its WeakMap singleton. Metadata lives on
context.metadata now, which also removes the dual ESM/CJS double-singleton
hazard. Inheritance merging becomes structural rather than reconstructed on
every read, so the subclass-shadowing defect fixed by hand in 0.1.0 cannot
reoccur by construction.
- registerDecorator, replaced by defineRule(Class, 'field', constraint).
Unchanged: the engine, options, naming strategies, access control, error
helpers, the sync API, and the performance work. 193 tests pass.
Toolchain note: standard decorators are transformed by tsc and esbuild, but not
yet by oxc. The library builds with tsc and consumers on esbuild/Vite are fine;
Vitest 4 uses oxc, so the test runner needs an esbuild transform plugin. This is
recorded in vitest.config.ts and the README, and is the reason 1.x should stay
available for oxc-based toolchains.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Synchronous API
---------------
Nothing on the default path is genuinely asynchronous - only a serializer,
deserializer or validator the caller supplies can be - so requiring `await`
everywhere taxed the common case.
Rather than duplicating the traversal into a second sync copy (the traversal is
exactly where the eight defects fixed in 0.1.0 lived, and two copies would drift),
the engines are now written synchronously and anything a hook makes asynchronous
is recorded and reconciled once at the end. A `*Sync` call that encounters a
Promise raises a JsonMappingError naming the async alternative instead of
returning a half-built object.
Adds validateSync, validateOrRejectSync, toPlainSync, toJsonSync, toInstanceSync,
toInstanceArraySync, fromJsonSync, fromJsonArraySync. fromRequest has no
synchronous form, since reading a request body is inherently async.
Removing the per-property await also sped up the async path substantially. With
the plan caching from the previous release, against JSON.parse + JSON.stringify
(5.8 us) as a fixed reference:
validate (50 orders) 221.6 us -> 17.8 us 12.4x
validate (10 orders) 47.8 us -> 4.5 us 10.6x
toPlain (50 orders) 294.4 us -> 36.0 us 8.2x
toInstance (50 orders) 255.1 us -> 31.7 us 8.0x
toInstance (single) 19.8 us -> 5.2 us 3.8x
Write-only redaction
--------------------
A @JsonWriteOnly password that failed @MinLength put the rejected password into
ValidationError.value, and from there into any log that recorded the error.
Values of properties that never leave the process - @JsonWriteOnly and
@JsonIgnore - are now replaced with the exported REDACTED placeholder. The
property name and failure message are unchanged, so the error stays actionable.
Tests
-----
176 tests, up from 150. The new suite covers the sync family, its refusal of
async hooks (including that refusing does not leave an unhandled rejection), and
async hooks through the async API - serializers, deserializers, validators, and
async validators under each: true, which the suite had never exercised.
That last group caught a regression this change introduced: with an async
serializer the deferred write appended its key after the synchronous ones,
changing property order in the output. The slot is now claimed before deferring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Profiling the validator showed roughly half of all validation time re-deriving
answers that cannot change — collectConstraints 22%, getOwnMetadata 12%,
getMetadataChain 9%, getProperties 4%, getMetadata 3%, plus 8% GC from the
allocation churn. The constraint predicates themselves were under 1%.
Decorator metadata is fixed once classes are declared, so the derived structures
are now memoized per prototype: the validation plan, the serialization plan, the
deserialization plan, and serializer/deserializer instances, which were being
constructed fresh for every property of every object. MetadataStorage carries a
version counter that invalidates the caches when metadata is written, so
registerDecorator after first use still works — covered by a test.
Measured against JSON.parse + JSON.stringify as a fixed reference:
validate (50 orders) 221.6 us -> 49.6 us 4.5x
validate (10 orders) 47.8 us -> 12.9 us 3.7x
toInstance (50 orders) 255.1 us -> 74.0 us 3.4x
toInstance (10 orders) 64.6 us -> 19.0 us 3.4x
toPlain (50 orders) 294.4 us -> 95.3 us 3.1x
Reliability, in the same pass:
- maxDepth option (default 64) on every mapping function, on validate(), and on
configure(). All three engines recurse, so a payload nested thousands of levels
deep could exhaust the call stack. Cycles were already handled; legitimate deep
nesting was not bounded.
- each: true failures now name the element that failed ("failed at index 3"). A
bad entry in a 200-item array previously produced a message that could not
locate it. A message function now receives the failing element as args.value
rather than the whole array; caller-supplied strings stay verbatim.
150 tests (up from 136), all green on the existing suite unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Rounds out the validator set with the rules an application actually reaches for,
all following the existing decorator style and honouring each/message options.
- equality and presence: @Equals, @NotEquals, @IsEmpty, @IsEnum, @IsInstance
- strings: @Length, @IsAlpha, @IsAlphanumeric, @IsNumberString, @IsLowercase,
@IsUppercase, @Contains, @NotContains, @StartsWith, @EndsWith
- formats: @IsUUID, @IsJSON, @IsDateString, @IsSemVer, @IsHexColor, @IsIP
- numbers: @IsDivisibleBy, @IsPort, @IsLatitude, @IsLongitude, @IsBigInt
- dates: @MinDate, @MaxDate
- arrays: @ArrayUnique, @ArrayContains, @ArrayNotContains
@ValidateIf(o => ...) makes a property's rules conditional on the rest of the
object, and @Allow() declares a property that needs no rules of its own so it
survives unknownKeys: 'strip'.
Two details worth noting. @IsEnum filters the reverse mapping a numeric enum
compiles to, so 'Low' is not accepted as a value of enum { Low, High }.
@MinDate/@MaxDate accept a thunk, so "not in the past" is evaluated per
validation instead of being frozen when the class was declared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
A library whose headline feature is "JSON mapping" could not map a name: there
was no way to read {"first_name": ...} into firstName, no way to keep a password
out of the response, and no way to parse a payload without validating it.
Name mapping
- @JsonProperty(name) renames a property in both directions
- @JsonAlias(...names) accepts extra names on input only, so a field can be
renamed without breaking older clients
- naming strategies (snake_case, kebab-case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, PascalCase,
camelCase, or your own function) for properties with no explicit name.
Acronyms split where a reader expects: parseHTTPResponse -> parse_http_response
Access control
- @JsonIgnore() excluded both ways
- @JsonWriteOnly() accepted from input, never echoed back (passwords)
- @JsonReadOnly() serialized, never settable by a client (server-owned ids)
Blocked names are dropped explicitly rather than falling through to the unknown
key path, which would otherwise have copied a rejected id straight back on under
the default policy.
Transform options, per call or globally via configure()
- validate: false to map without validating, for lenient parsing
- unknownKeys: 'allow' | 'strip' | 'error'
- namingStrategy
Error ergonomics — the nested ValidationError tree was hard to turn into an HTTP
400 body. flattenErrors() yields {"items[0].qty": ["qty must be at least 1"]},
plus formatErrors() and collectErrorMessages(). Adds validateOrReject().
All defaults preserve existing behaviour; the 68 prior tests pass unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Each fix is pinned by a regression test in src/regressions.test.ts describing the
old behaviour.
- Inheritance dropped base-class rules. A subclass re-decorating an inherited
property registered its constraints against its own prototype, and validate()
read only the nearest set, so everything the base declared was silently lost.
Constraints are now merged down the whole prototype chain, base first, with
genuinely identical rules collapsed so restating @IsString() on an override
does not double-report. The library's own example.ts was affected: Media's
@IsString() title had never been enforced for Book.
- Circular references exhausted the heap. serialize() recursed forever, taking
8 GB and the process with it; it now tracks ancestors and raises a
JsonMappingError naming the cause. Diamonds still serialize. validate() skips
back-edges instead of recursing.
- @Matches with a g or y flag was stateful: RegExp.test advances lastIndex, so
validating the same value twice gave different answers. Those flags are
stripped.
- An unmatched @JsonPolymorphic discriminator silently dropped the value — the
single-object branch fell through without assigning. The raw value is now
preserved, with { onUnknown: 'error' } and { fallback } to choose otherwise.
- Custom @JsonSerialize serializers ran on null/undefined, crashing on any unset
optional property. They now only see real values.
- serialize() read obj.constructor.prototype, which throws for null-prototype
objects; both engines now agree on Object.getPrototypeOf.
- __proto__, constructor and prototype arriving in untrusted JSON were copied
onto the instance, detaching it from its own class. They are dropped.
- The "each element in ..." prefix was glued onto caller-supplied messages, and
two rules sharing a name overwrote each other so only one failure surfaced.
Also adds toInstanceArray/fromJsonArray, since toInstance and fromJson accept
arrays at runtime but type the result as T, and reports a non-JSON request body
in fromRequest as a JsonMappingError rather than a raw SyntaxError.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Claude