Storing dict outside of visual.ts

[BrentonC]

Hello,

I have encoded a heap of images as base64 and stored them in a dict, currently, it is making a mess in my visual.ts file, it's super long. Is there any way I can store these in another file and call the variable when needed? I have been banging my head against the wall for a while.

Thank You

[dm-p · Accepted solution]

Hi @BrentonC,

1. Create a file in the relative folder to your visual.ts, e.g. constants.ts.
2. Cut/paste your dict declaration into this file.
3. Change private dict to export const dict
4. In your visual.ts, at the top, add import { dict } from './constants'; (edited for correctness)
5. You can then access the object as dict anywhere in the visual.ts code (so you may need to remove 'this.' from any instances if you've done that, as it's no longer a property of your Visual class.

Note that you don't have to use these exact names, just make sure everything links together, e.g. the constant name and the file it's sourced from.

Also, the export in front of your const declaration in step 3 is very important, otherwise it's not 'visible' to other files when you try to import it.

If you want to see a pre-canned example within your project (assuming you started with a blank visual), your settings.ts does the same thing with the VisualSettings class declaration, and its subsequent import into visual.ts.

Here's some further reading on ES6 imports and exports.

Good luck!

Daniel

[BrentonC]

Thank you, it did have an issue with me trying to import './constants.ts' as it did not want the extension on there so './constants' did the job. I am not very familiar with javascript/node.js, best I do some reading up on it and learn the fundamentals. Thank you for the good explanation.

Brenton Collins

[dm-p]

Glad to hear it's working for you, and thanks for the feedback on the file extension - I'll update the answer with the correct info 🙂