facebook/relay

[Modern] Export Flow types from `relay-runtime`

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#1758 opened on May 15, 2017

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 (23 comments) (31 reactions) (0 assignees)Rust (18,930 stars) (1,874 forks)batch import
enhancementhelp wanted

Description

As things stand, the Flow types that the Relay compiler generates are unusable without a decent amount of fiddling to stub out the types they import, as documented in #1689.

The gist of it is that these generated files are trying to import various types from relay-runtime, but these types are not exported from those NPM packages. There are various ways to work around this, with the commonly accepted solution being to stub out the required types in a library definition, but these are far from ideal.

In my opinion, the ideal solution would be to include the Flow type definitions in the compiled NPM package. There's a few ways to go about this, from including the original sources alongside the Babel transpiled ones with the .js.flow extension, to including just the types in this with the still-experimental flow gen-flow-files command, but whatever the approach, including type definitions would be tremendously helpful.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
javascriptgraphqlreact
Domain
developer experiencetooling
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
Familiarity with Flow type systemUnderstanding of NPM package structureKnowledge of Relay compilation process
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
50
Research direction
The issue requests exporting Flow types from relay runtime. It references issue #1689 for context. Possible approaches include including .js.flow files or using the flow gen flow files command. The scope is limited to ensuring the npm package includes type definitions. No linked PRs or maintainer comments indicate the preferred approach.