Angular FormBuilder with spread operator on object with arrays has FormControls of the wrong type

Question

I'm using the Angular FormBuilder (import { FormBuilder } from '@angular/forms';) to create my FormGroup and inner FormControls as this right now:

formGroup = new FormBuilder().nonNullable.group({
   ...this.newInstance(), // to create all FormControls
});

// Create new instance with default values:
protected override newInstance(): MyDto {
  return {
    id: 0,
    name: '',
    active: true,
    groups: [],
    nodes: [],
  };
}

Where MyDto interface looks like this:

export interface MyDto {
  id: number;
  name: string;
  active: boolean;
  groups: number[];
  nodes: MyNode[];
}

My formGroup now has inner FormControls of the following types:

id: FormControl<number> (as expected)
name: FormControl<string> (as expected)
active: FormControl<boolean> (as expected)
groups: FormControl<number> (number instead of number[])
nodes: FormControl<MyNode> (MyNode instead of MyNode[])

But if I change my formGroup to this:

formGroup = new FormBuilder().nonNullable.group({
   ...this.newInstance(), // to create all FormControls

   // Correct the arrays...
   groups: [],
   nodes: [],
});

The types are correct: FormControl<number[]> and FormControl<MyNode[]>.

If there any reason why Angular/TypeScript won't be able to recognize my arrays when I use the this.newInstance() with ... spread function? Is there perhaps a better fix than my ugly work-around above? I actually use more arrays in my actual code than the example above, and it's a bit of an eye-sore.

One thing I did try, without any change (as I was kinda expecting), was explicitly mentioning the types in my newInstance function like this:

// Create new instance with default values:
protected override newInstance(): MyDto {
  return {
    id: 0,
    name: '',
    active: true,
    groups: [] as number[],
    nodes: [] as MyNode[],
  } as MyDto;
}

Naren Murali · Accepted Answer · 2025-06-13 11:01:50Z

0

The typing seems to be lost when we use destructuring.

So we can convert the two properties where typing is lost to be defined with FormControl (Long Syntax), I have used nonNullable property to assert that the typing cannot be null.

Since we have this typing problem I removed the return type of newInstance so that TypeScript type inference can take care of it.

// Create new instance with default values:
protected newInstance() {
  return {
    id: 0,
    name: '',
    active: true,
    groups: new FormControl<number[]>([], {
      nonNullable: true,
    }),
    nodes: new FormControl<number[]>([], {
      nonNullable: true,
    }),
  };
}

Stackblitz Demo

edited Jun 13 at 11:01

answered Jun 13 at 10:35

Naren Murali

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