Our Frontend is responsible for converting fields into labels that make more sense to users.

So far I have seen the use of Enums to solve that purpose but we can also use Objects literals with satisfies and I believe its more developer friendly, flexible and when compiled, it resembles JS.

Object literals: Meant to be used for key-value pairs.

Object literals with satisfies: Preserves the exact literal types.

A use case:

Let’s say we have an Artist songs page that can be sorted by either title, album name, duration , and # of plays. Our sorting mechanism, in this case a REST API, allows sorting by any of the fields.

First, I would create a declarative sort dropdown component where the keys match the API fields and the values offer user-friendly labels

Solution with Object literal 

const artistSongSortOptions = {
  title: 'Title',
  albumName: 'Album name',
  duration: 'Duration',
  numberOfPlays: 'Number of Plays',
} as const satisfies Record<string, string>
// We make object read-only by using as const

// Create type from artistSongSortOptions keys
type ArtistSongSortBy = keyof typeof artistSongSortOptions;

🕵️‍♀️ Hover over that new created type

title, albumName, duration, numberOfPlays

Nice. Object literals are just brilliant ✨

With this approach you can easily complete the following:

  • Display a list of available options, coming from Object.keys(artistSongSortOptions)
  • When an option is selected by the user, you can show the user-friendly text by accessing artistSongSortOptions[selectedOption]
  • Fetch API with sortBy of a type ArtistSongSortBy

A later use case:

Time passes, and you need to display a new page for multiple artists; an API allows sorting only by one of the valid fields: title, albumName, duration, numberOfPlays, and a new field artistName (it's a list of artists, we would like to sort by artist name as well 😉)

I would simply use again object literals

const multiArtistSongSortOptions = {
  ...artistSongSortOptions,
  artistName: 'Artist name',
} as const satisfies Record<string, string>
// We make object read-only by using as const
// Create type from artistSongSortOptions keys
type MultiArtistSongSortBy = keyof typeof multiArtistSongSortOptions

🕵️‍♀️ Hover over that new created type
title, albumName, duration, numberOfPlays and, artist name

Advantages of developing this way

  • Single source of truth: Automatic type updates
  • Type safety
  • Simple HTML generation
  • Consistency with API

Another way is to use Enums, however I consider the use of object literal more intuitive. If you still prefer Enums and want to use them for field mappings, I would recommend using ESLint, check out this post.