Why there is readonly modifier on Table.table?

[IlyaSemenov]

The documentation says: "Note that the table property is marked as readonly, this is needed for TypeScript to check the usage of the table in queries."

export class UserTable extends BaseTable {
  // Here
  readonly table = "user"

  columns = this.setColumns(...)
}

Is this still relevant? Which code triggers errors without readonly? I just tried to replace all readonly table with table on a smaller sized project (5 cross-related tables, but with deeply nested queries), and there were no typecheck errors on Typescript 5.2.2 / orchid-orm 1.18.0.

---

Besides, in the latest Nuxt 3.12 / Typescript 5.5.4 / orchid-orm 1.34.5 project, I'm seeing this when running nuxt typecheck (but no errors in the IDE for some reason):

server/db/tables/user.table.ts:6:3 - error TS4114: This member must have an 'override' modifier because it overrides a member in the base class 'BaseTableInstance<{ id: () => ColumnWithDefault<UUIDColumn<DefaultSchemaConfig>, () => string> & { data: { primaryKey: string; }; } & { data: { default: RawSQLBase<...>; }; }; ... 52 more ...; timestampsNoTZ<T extends ColumnTypeBase>(this: { ...; }): Timestamps<...>; }>'.

I had to add override readonly table = "user" to fix that, but now I'm not sure if readonly is actually needed?

[romeerez]

Ah, I didn't know about override, have seen it in bingtsingw's repros and wondered why is that needed.

Removing readonly won't cause TS errors, because the table property's type will be string, and you could reference columns from non-existing tables without objections from TS:

db.someTable.select('awawa.column')

Of course, I wish readonly wasn't needed, and will try to redesign table initialization in the future.

[IlyaSemenov]

Understood. I see some problems with typings in join queries indeed. Thanks for clarification.