Is there a way for typescript to infer types that depend on the input parameters?

Issue

The below describes what I'd like to do:

interface Customer {
    name: string;
    age: number;
}

const getCustomer = () => {
    return {
        name: 'bob',
        age: 42
    }
}

export const getValue = (key: keyof Customer): typeof Customer[key] => {
    const customer = getCustomer();
    return customer[key];
};

but the TS compiler doesn't like the line typeof Customer[key]. I could make this any or string | number, but I should be able to get the type from this. For example, if I write:

getValue('name') what does it return? You know without any runtime information, it returns a string. What if I write getValue('age')? A number of course. getValue(someInputVal as any) might return string or number, but all of this is perfectly available at compile time. So - is there a way to get this from typescript?

Solution

you can slightly rewrite your function to use a generic:

export function getValue<T extends keyof Customer>(key: T): Customer[T] {
    const customer = getCustomer();
    return customer[key];
};

what this is essentially saying is that getValue should only accept an argument that extends the keys of the Customer interface and it will return the associated type with that T key from the interface.

here is a ts playground link with the example solution i suggested

Answered By - Yash