Vue Pinia Store - how to get the initial state? - vuejs3

Question

I have an object in my pinia store like
import { defineStore } from "pinia";
export const useSearchStore = defineStore("store", {
state: () => {
return {
myobj: {
foo: 0,
bar: 2000,
too: 1000,
},
};
},
getters: {
changed() {
// doesn't work
return Object.entries(this.myobj).filter(([key, value]) => value != initialvalue
);
},
},
});
How do I get the initial value to test if the object changed. Or how can I return a filtered object with only those entries different from initial state?
My current workaround:
in a created hook I make a hard copy of the store object I then can compare to. I guess there is a more elegant way...

Answer 1

I had done this (although I do not know if there a better way to avoid cloning without duplicating your initial state).
Define your initial state outside and assign it to a variable as follows;
const initialState = {
foo: 0,
bar: 2000,
too: 1000
}
Then you can use cloning to retain the original state;
export const useSearchStore = defineStore("store", {
state: () => {
return {
myobj: structuredClone(initialState),
};
},
getters: {
changed: (state) => deepEquals(initialState, state.myobj);
},
});
where deepEquals is a method which deep compares the two objects (which you would have to implement). I would use lodash (npm i lodash and npm i #types/lodash --save-dev if you're using TypeScript) for this.
Full code (with lodash);
import { defineStore } from "pinia";
import { cloneDeep, isEqual } from "lodash";
const initialState = {
foo: 0,
bar: 2000,
too: 1000
}
export const useSearchStore = defineStore("store", {
state: () => ({
myobj: cloneDeep(initialState)
}),
getters: {
changed(state) {
return isEqual(initialState, state.myobj);
},
},
});
If you also want the differences between the two you can use the following function (the _ is lodash - import _ from "lodash");
function difference(object, base) {
function changes(object, base) {
return _.transform(object, function (result: object, value, key) {
if (!_.isEqual(value, base[key])) {
result[key] =
_.isObject(value) && _.isObject(base[key])
? changes(value, base[key])
: value;
}
});
}
return changes(object, base);
}
courtesy of https://gist.github.com/Yimiprod/7ee176597fef230d1451
EDIT:
The other way you would do this is to use a watcher to subscribe to changes. The disadvantage to this is that you either have to be OK with your state marked as "changed" if you change back the data to the initial state. Otherwise, you would have to implement a system (perhaps using a stack data structure) to maintain a list of changes so that if two changes which cancel each other out occur then you would remark the state as "unchanged". You would have to keep another variable (boolean) in the state which holds whether the state has been changed/unchanged - but this would be more complicated to implement and (depending on your use case) not worth it.