Rename key while encoding?

[aaronsky]

Hey! Thanks for making this package, I'm finding it much more robust than the custom querystring constructor I wrote myself.

Here's my question: is there a way to rename a key while encoding its value? I'm wrestling with an API that expects the consumer to potentially provide limit?: number and limit?: { // ... } on some object, potentially at the same time. It's weird and frustrating, since I can't have two members with the same key on the query object. However, when expressed in the querystring limit=20&limit[apps]=30, it's technically valid. One way I'm getting around this is to name the object-typed limit key limitField to maintain symmetry with other parts of the query. In my custom stringify-er, I renamed the limitField key back to limit manually. Is it possible with the feature set that qs has today to perform that rename during processing?

[ljharb]

I have no concept of how limit=20&limit[apps]=30 makes any sense given that rails, php, and express will likely be unable to parse that into an object structure properly.

It certainly seems reasonable to provide (in both parse and stringify), a kind of mapKey option, that takes a key and its value and returns a mapped key name. Would that suffice? I'm thinking you could provide something like mapKey: (key, value) => key !== 'limitField' ? key : 'limit'.

This might be complex to implement, however, so unless someone submits a PR it might not happen quickly.

[aaronsky]

Yeah, it’s a real frustrating decision they made.

That solution sounds great! I’ll have to dig around to see what needs to happen to support this. Thanks for getting back to me!

[ljharb]

@aaronsky you closed #293; are you no longer interested in this feature?

Closing; but happy to reopen if there's still interest.