This blog is a part of my TypeScript series, and the previous ones are:

1. Why program in TypeScript
2. Structural vs nominal typing

In the next several blogs, I’ll focus on object-oriented features of Typescript – classes and interfaces. Let’s start with classes.

First of all, let me remind you that starting from the ECMAScript 2015 spec (a.k.a. ES6), JavaScript supports classes. Being a superset of JavaScript, TypeScript supports all features from JavaScript classes and adds some extras.

For example, JavaScript doesn’t offer syntax for declaring class properties, but TypeScript does. In the screenshot below on the left, you can see how I declared and instantiated the class Person that has three properties. The right side shows the ES6 version of this code produced by the TypeScript compiler:

As you see, there are no properties in the JavaScript version of the class Person. Also, since the class Person didn’t declare a constructor, we had to initialize its properties after instantiating. A constructor is a special function that’s executed only once when the instance of a class is created.

Declaring a constructor with three arguments would allow you to instantiate the class Person and initialize its properties in one line. In TypeScript, you can provide type annotation for constructor’s arguments, but there’s more.

TypeScript offers access level qualifiers public, private, and protected (I’ll cover these in the future blog), and if you use any of them with the constructor arguments, the TypeScript will generate the code for adding these properties in a JavaScript object as in the following screenshot:

Now the code of the TypeScript class (on the left) is more concise and the generated JavaScript code creates three properties in the constructor. We’d like to bring your attention to line 6 in the above screenshot on the left. We declared the constant without specifying its type, but we could have re-written this line explicitly specifying the type of p as follows:

const p: Person = new Person("John", "Smith", 25);

This illustrates an unnecessary use of an explicit type annotation. Since you declare a constant and immediately initialize it with an object of a known type (i.e. Person), the TypeScript type checker can easily infer and assign the type to the constant p. The generated JavaScript code will look the same with or without specifying the type of p. You can try it in the TypeScript playground by following this link.

Regardless if a class has a constructor or it doesn’t, classes allow you to declare custom types that didn’t exist in TypeScript before.

NOTE: We use the public access level with each constructor argument in the TypeScript class, which simply means that the generated corresponding properties can be accessed from any code located both inside and outside of the class.

When you declare the properties of a class, you can also mark them as readonly. Such properties can be initialized either at the declaration point or in the class constructor, and their values can’t be changed afterwards. The readonly qualifier is similar to the const keyword, but the latter can’t be used with class properties.

Getting familiar with class inheritance

In real life, every person inherits some features from his or her parents. Similarly, in the TypeScript world, you can create a new class, based on the existing one. For example, you can create a class Person with some properties and then the class Employee that will _inherit_ all the properties of Person and declare some additional ones.

Inheritance is one of the main features of any object-oriented language. TypeScript has the keyword extends to declare that one class is inherited from the other.

The line 7 in the following screenshot shows how to declare an Employee class that extends the class Person and declares an additional property department. In line 11, we create an instance of the class Employee.

This screenshot was taken from the playground at typscriptlang.org after we entered empl. followed by CTRL-Space on line 13. The TypeScript’s static analyzer recognizes that the type Employee is inherited from Person so it suggests the properties defined in both classes Person and Employee.

In our example, the class Employee is a subclass of Person. Accordingly, the class Person is a superclass of Employee. You can also say that the class Person is an ancestor and Employee is a descendant of Person.

NOTE: Under the hood, JavaScript supports prototypal _object-based_ inheritance, where one object can assign another object as its prototype, and this happens during the runtime. During transpiling to JavaScript, the generated code uses the syntax of the prototypal inheritance as seen in the above screenshot on the right.

In addition to properties, a class can include _methods_ – this is how we call functions declared inside the classes. And if a method(s) is declared in a superclass, it will be inherited by the subclass unless the method was declared with the access qualified private which we’ll discuss a bit later.

The next version of the class Person is shown in the screenshot below, and it includes the method sayHello(). As you can see in line 17, TypeScript included this method in its typeahead help.

You may be wondering, “Is there any way to control which properties and methods of a superclass are accessible from the subclass?”
Actually, a more general question would be “Is there any way to control which properties and methods of a class are accessible from other scripts?” The answer is yes – this is what the private, protected, and public keywords are for, and I’ll cover them in the next blog. Stay tuned…