Remove generated types redundancy via field interfaces

[hdodov]

We have a group of meta fields (under a meta field of type group) that we have on all globals and on some collections, like this:

export const metaField = {
  name: "meta",
  type: "group",
  fields: [
    {
      name: "title",
      type: "text",
    },
    {
      name: "description",
      type: "textarea",
    },
    // ...
  ],
};

import { metaField } from "./fields/metaField";

export const Global1 = {
  slug: "global-1",
  fields: [
    metaField,
    // ...other fields
  ],
};

However, this results in fields having the following types:

export interface Global1 {
  id: string;
  meta: {
    title?: string | null;
    description?: string | null;
  };
  // ...
  updatedAt?: string | null;
  createdAt?: string | null;
}

export interface Global2 {
  id: string;
  meta: {
    title?: string | null;
    description?: string | null;
  };
  // ...
  updatedAt?: string | null;
  createdAt?: string | null;
}

// etc.

This means that every single global has a copy of the fields in meta, which are identical.

---

Fields could have a separate interface attribute that could hint Payload to generate a separate TypeScript interface for it, like so:

export const metaField = {
  name: "meta",
  type: "group",
+ interface: 'Meta',
  fields: [
    // ...
  ],
};

Then, the types could look like so:

+ export interface Meta {
+   title?: string | null;
+   description?: string | null;
+ }

export interface Global1 {
  id: string;
+ meta: Meta;
- meta: {
-   title?: string | null;
-   description?: string | null;
- };
  updatedAt?: string | null;
  createdAt?: string | null;
}

export interface Global2 {
  id: string;
+ meta: Meta;
- meta: {
-   title?: string | null;
-   description?: string | null;
- };
  updatedAt?: string | null;
  createdAt?: string | null;
}

This way, payload-types.ts will be shorter.

Also, this offers users to import the field type for usage in other files. Otherwise, you have to import a global type and access the types this way. In this example, you have to import either Global1 or Global2 and use Global1["meta"], which is confusing. Importing a Meta interface would be much better.

[javierlinked]

Is interfaceName what you are looking for? It's part of BlockField.

[hdodov]

It appears that this exists on the group field as well and does exactly what I want. Thank you!