[Enhancement]: automatically parse all options as string

[milanholemans]

We use Minimist to parse options to typescript variables. By default, Minimist parses all options what he thinks is best. abc will be parsed to a string, 123 to a number etc.

This can lead to unwanted behaviors. When we type an option as string in our interfaces, we expect this property to be a string in our code as well. However it's possible that a user passes 123 as value to a string typed option. In this case, Minimist will parse it as a number. Because we type it as string, all our validators fail because you can't do a .toLowerCase() function on a number for example. When this happens, the user will see a very nasty error in the console which is absolutely no help.

The good thing is, we can tell Minimist the type of options, we can tell which options are a boolean, and which are a string. The best way to tackle this issue is to type all our options as string or boolean in Minimist. But this would lead to things like the code sample below:

cli-microsoft365/src/m365/pa/commands/app/app-permission-ensure.ts

Lines 146 to 148 in 613eb82

	#initTypes(): void {
	this.types.string.push('appName', 'roleName', 'userId', 'userName', 'groupId', 'groupName', 'environmentName');
	}

This is very much "useless" work. A better approach would be to type all options as string by default in Minimist, and use the #initTypes function to define the options that are no strings (numbers, boolean).

Example

interface Options {
   name?: string;
   displayName?: string;
   id?: string;
   mail?: string;
   amount?: number;
   sendMail?: boolean;
}

To be sure that all options are correctly typed, we now have to tell this to Minimist by doing:

#initTypes(): void { 
   this.types.string.push('name', 'displayName', 'id', 'mail');
   this.types.booleans.push('sendMail');
 } 

A better approach would be to parse all options as string by default and add:

#initTypes(): void { 
   this.types.numbers.push('amount');
   this.types.booleans.push('sendMail');
 } 

[waldekmastykarz]

Let's also not forget option aliases/shorts which from minimist point of view are considered separate options

[milanholemans]

@pnp/cli-for-microsoft-365-maintainers is this ready to be opened?

[Jwaegebaert]

LGTM!

[milanholemans]

We are currently doing some research to move to yargs-parser with ZOD, this issue is no longer needed.