When working on an Angular project with Typescript, it is common to reference multiple services at the top of each controller. This can lead to repetitive code like the example below:
/// <reference path="../../../typings/tsd.d.ts" />
/// <reference path="../shared/checkoutstaticcontent.ts" />
/// <reference path="../../common/services/settingsservice.ts" />
/// <reference path="reviewcartservice.ts" />
To streamline this process, I wanted to simplify the references in each controller to just one .ts definition file. In order to achieve this, I decided to create a single file called myapp.d.ts which would contain all custom app definitions in addition to the existing tsd.d.ts file that references third-party libraries such as angular and underscore.
To generate myapp.d.ts, I added a gulp task:
var ts = require('gulp-typescript');
gulp.src('Scripts/**/*.ts')
.pipe(ts({ target: 'ES5', declaration: true }))
.dts.pipe(concat('myapp.d.ts'))
.pipe(gulp.dest('typings'))
.on('error', errorHandler);
While this successfully created the merged definition file, it introduced a new challenge of duplicate definitions. The error arises as the definitions existing in individual files now also exist in the referenced myapp.d.ts. I'm now exploring different options to handle this issue effectively.