Serializing and Deserializing objects with BigNumber fields

[Mahamed-Belkheir]

So I'm looking to send objects with Big Number fields through message queues and DBs, and I can't really find anyone talking about this. Is there a way to do this?

ethers.BigNumberify(objectWithBigNumberFields)

Currently I've done the following but I dont want to be reinventing the wheel

import { ethers } from "ethers";

export function bigNumberify(data: any) {
    switch (typeof data) {
        case "object":
            if (data._isBigNumber) {
                return ethers.BigNumber.from(data._hex)
            } else {
                for(let key in data) {
                    data[key] = bigNumberify(data[key])
                }
            }
            break;
        case "string":
            try {
                data = JSON.parse(data);
                return bigNumberify(data)
            } catch {
                return data
            }
        default:
            return data;
    }
}

(the reason I'm parsing strings as json is because big number IDs are saved as string in the DB, which ends up being the json string of the big number)

Should I just go with this or is there a built in utility/helper function?

[ricmoo]

You could just use JSON.stringify, no?

Also, you should t use the v._isBigNumber, use BigNumber.isBigNumber(v). Things starting with a _ should be considered private.

It depends a lot on what you are doing, but that seems a bit more complicated and fragile than I’d use…

[Mahamed-Belkheir]

JSON.parse would then just return normal objects instead of BigNumber objects.
Basically what I want is a function like JSON parse that can identify BigNumber attributes inside objects it's parsing, I'm passing around those objects around services, and they have to get serialized an deserialized. and I dont want to assert everywhere that an attribute has already been BigNumber'd before I use it, I'd rather just have it all done on parse