total in pagination is a string

[moltar]

Database: Postgres

Using pagination and the total field is returned as a string, where all the rest of the pagination values are a number.

{"total":"74","perPage":20,"page":1,"lastPage":4,  ....

[thetutlage]

Seems to be directly related to node-postgres.

https://node-postgres.com/features/types#strings-by-default
brianc/node-postgres#353
bookshelf/bookshelf#1275

[moltar]

Yes, I had the feeling it was to do with bigints.

Do you think we should maybe handle this case somehow? I think the cases where someone would have a bigint are super small, and everyone suffers from that. Maybe we could detect normal ints and then convert the number to int, and for bigints leave as a string (or wrap in a bigint lib).

But at a minimum, I think this should be documented. As the docs show the total being an int.

[thetutlage]

Agree, it must be in the documentation.

Detecting and converting behind the scenes is not a good idea, since you are modifying the input and people never know, whether to expect a number of a string.

[moltar]

Maybe a config option, at least? It's pretty tedious to wrap every output just to change total to a number. For most projects I just know I won't have a bigint issue. It'd be a good problem to have :)

[moltar]

I'm wondering if this would be possible via a custom serializer? Does serializer apply to pagination meta data too?

[thetutlage]

If a value is a bigInt and you try to read it as a number, then it be corrupted at the first place before you can transform it to string.

You can read more about bigInts issue with Javascript in general.

I am happy accepting PR for the docs though

[moltar]

If a value is a bigInt and you try to read it as a number, then it be corrupted at the first place before you can transform it to string.

Yeah, I am aware. But I don't care about bigint for 99% of projects. They'll never reach that level of data. I am just trying to solve it for myself. Not saying it needs to be part of core. Just trying to find a good solution which does not require unwraping and re-casting every database response.

I am just thinking out-loud re customer serializers. Is it something that can be applied in this case? If we have a clear path to solving it, I'll document it too.

[thetutlage]

In that case, what you can do is use the pg library types parser. brianc/node-postgres#353 (comment) and https://github.com/brianc/node-pg-types

[borie88]

I've had this issue in all of my projects. Only the "page" value is a string though. Using mysql