Question: Usage for generating types for variables (e.g. a "variables.scss")

[fullyherge]

We have a maybe irrelevant for this package use case in which we mostly want to generate type definitions for our variables.

For example we would like this .scss:

$screen-size-keys: ("xxs", "xs", "sm", "md", "lg", "xl", "xxl");
$screen-size-map: (
  "xxs": 280px,
  "xs": 320px,
  "sm": 576px,
  "md": 768px,
  "lg": 992px,
  "xl": 1200px,
  "xxl": 1400px,
);

to generate something like this .d.ts

type ScreenSizeKeys = "xxs" | "xs" | "sm" | "md" | "lg" | "xl" | "xxl";
type ScreenSizeMap = {
  [key: string]: string // or if I may dream ` { [key in ScreenSizeKeys]: string } `
};

Is this completely out of the scope of this package? If no, how would I accomplish this? If yes, does anyone know any library for doing something like this?

[mcgrealife]

+1 have you found anything yet @fullyherge?

[fullyherge]

+1 have you found anything yet @fullyherge?

Sadly no. We worked around it for now.

[skovy]

This package primarily focuses on supporting CSS Modules which primarily considers CSS classes as the public API. Since these aren't exported producing types outside of this is out of scope. If this is a common enough pattern I could see a reason to include it.

If we were to consider supporting it, I'd probably prefer still relying on "CSS Modules Public API", which includes the :export token. I've not explicitly tested it, but in theory it could already be supported via :export since postcss-modules links to the CSS Modules repo which defines this token. If not, I'd be open to making :export work as a way to make something like this work potentially?

[fullyherge]

Makes sense!
Using :export for this sounds very reasonable to me. It's our primary use-case for getting the variables into the JS context anyhow.

As it works now, though it doesn't seem well supported, for example:

$shades: ("light", "dark");
:export {
  shades: $shades;
}

Generates

export declare const shades: string;

I assume the issue here is that :export always requires a stringified version of the variables being exported.

[skovy]

You're saying it's outputting string instead of a union of the two specific strings? I think we can add logic to try to make this more strict for this case and fallback to string

[fullyherge]

Yeah exactly