Amazon Ion JavaScript

An implementation of Amazon Ion for JavaScript written in TypeScript.

This package is tested with Node JS major versions 14, 16, and 18. While this library should be usable within browsers that support ES5+, please note that it is not currently being tested in any browser environments.

Getting Started

You can use this library either as a Node.js module or inside an HTML page.

NPM

Add ion-js to your dependencies using npm
```
npm install --save ion-js
```

Use the library to read/write Ion data. Here is an example that reads Ion data from a JavaScript string:

let ion = require("ion-js");

// Reading
let ionData = '{ greeting: "Hello", name: "Ion" }';
let value = ion.load(ionData);
console.log(value.greeting + ", " + value.name + "!");

// Writing
let ionText = ion.dumpText(value);
console.log("Serialized Ion: " + ionText);

For more examples, see the Ion DOM README.

Try it yourself.

Note: if your package's public interface exposes part of this library, this library should be specified as a peer dependency in your package's package.json file. Otherwise, packages that depend on your package and this library may experience unexpected behavior, as two installations of this library (even if the same version) are not designed or tested to behave correctly.

Web Browser

You can include the Ion-js bundle (ES5 compatible) using the URLs

These will create and initialize window.ion which has the same exact API as our npm package. Here is an example

<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
  <script src="scripts/ion-bundle.min.js"></script>

  <!-- more HTML/JS code that can now use `window.ion` to create/write Ion -->
</head>
</html>

API

TypeDoc generated documentation can be found at here. Please note that anything not documented in the the API documentation is not supported for public use and is subject to change in any version.

Git Setup

This repository contains a git submodule called ion-tests, which holds test data used by ion-js's unit tests.

The easiest way to clone the ion-js repository and initialize its ion-tests submodule is to run the following command.

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/amazon-ion/ion-js.git ion-js

Alternatively, the submodule may be initialized independently from the clone by running the following commands.

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Development

Use npm to setup the dependencies. In the project directory you can run the following:

$ npm install

Building the package can be done with the release script (which runs the tests).

$ npm run release

Tests can be run using npm as well

$ npm test

This package uses Grunt for its build tasks. For convenience, you may want to install this globally:

$ npm -g install grunt-cli
$ grunt release

Or you could use the locally installed Grunt:

$ ./node_modules/.bin/grunt release

Build Output

The build above will compile the library into the dist directory. This directory has subdirectories of the form <module type>/<target ES version>. In general, we target ES6 and rely on polyfills to support earlier versions.

dist/es6/es6 - Targets the ES6 module system and ES6
dist/commonjs/es6 - Targets the CommonJS module system and ES6
dist/amd/es6 - Targets the AMD module system and ES6

A distribution using browserify and babelify creates a browser friendly polyfilled distribution targeting ES5: at dist/browser/js/ion-bundle.js.

Ion Specification Support

Types	IonText	IonBinary	Limitations
`null`	yes	yes	none
`bool`	yes	yes	none
`int`	yes	yes	underscores, binary digits
`float`	yes	yes	underscores
`decimal`	yes	yes	none
`timestamp`	yes	yes	none
`string`	yes	yes	none
`symbol`	yes	yes	`$0`, symbol tokens
`blob`	yes	yes	none
`clob`	yes	yes	none
`struct`	yes	yes	none
`list`	yes	yes	none
`sexp`	yes	yes	none
annotations	yes	yes	none
local symbol tables	yes	yes	none
shared symbol tables	no	yes	none

Notes:

test/iontests.ts defines multiple skipList variables referencing test vectors that are not expected to work at this time.
ion-js supports shared symbol table for Ion Binary. Below is an example of how shared symbol table can be used here: ```javascript // Create a SharedSymbolTable with the desired strings let sharedSymbolTable = new SharedSymbolTable('foo', 1, ['id', 'name']); // Define an import chain // The system symbol table does not import any other tables (null below) let systemSymbolTableImport = new Import(null, getSystemSymbolTable()); // The shared symbol table imports the system symbol table let sharedSymbolTableImport = new Import(systemSymbolTableImport, sharedSymbolTable); // Create a local symbol table that imports the shared symbol table let localSymbolTable = new LocalSymbolTable(sharedSymbolTableImport); // Create a writer that uses our new local symbol table let writer = new BinaryWriter(localSymbolTable, new Writeable());

// Write id and name fields in a struct writer.stepIn(IonTypes.STRUCT); writer.writeFieldName("id"); writer.writeInt(5); writer.writeFieldName("name"); writer.writeString("Max"); writer.stepOut(); writer.close();

// Create a catalog with shared symbol table let catalog = new Catalog(); catalog.add(sharedSymbolTable);

// Create a reader with catalog let bytes = writer.getBytes(); let reader = makeReader(bytes, catalog);


## Contributing

See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md)

## License

This library is licensed under [Apache License version 2.0](LICENSE)

## Links
For more information about Ion or its other implementation, please see:

* [Ion](https://amazon-ion.github.io/ion-docs/)
* [Ion Specification](https://amazon-ion.github.io/ion-docs/spec.html)
* [Ion Cookbook](https://amazon-ion.github.io/ion-docs/cookbook.html) uses the Java library for its examples.
* [Ion C](https://github.com/amazon-ion/ion-c)
* [Ion Java](https://github.com/amazon-ion/ion-java)
* [Ion Python](https://github.com/amazon-ion/ion-python)