Postgres BigInt Returned As String

[careygister]

Sails version: 0.12.13
Node version: v6.9.4
NPM version: 3.10.10
Operating system: 4.9.13-moby Linux x86_64

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I am using an existing set of Postgres tables in my Sails models. The tables have BigInt datatypes. I specified 'integer' as the type, assuming that Javascript native integers or numbers were used. I found that the returned datatype from a 'find' was a string. How can I model a Bigint?

Note: the native precision of Javascript numbers permits the representation of a Postgres Bigint.

Thank you.

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[careygister]

Ok, fixed!

[sailsbot]

@careygister Thanks for posting, we'll take a look as soon as possible.

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[wulfsolter]

I had a play with this a while back and as annoying as this is, after deeper research I do believe this is the correct behavior.

JavaScript's Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER is 9007199254740991 = 2^53-1.
Postgres' BigInt is up to 9223372036854775807 = 2^64 which is 1024x larger

There's a very real possibility for Postgres' BigInt to overflow JavaScript. When using numbers > MAX_SAFE_INTEGER, no errors or warnings are thrown (AFAIK) but the value is no longer true. Try it yourself by pasting Postgres' BigInt max into the console.

With that in mind, I guess I can't help but feel that I'd rather my ORM return an accurate string representation and leave it to me to typecast or manipulate using a library such as big-integer or bignum. BigInts as strings is pretty common in JS land, for example (twitter's JSON API returns the 64-bit int ID both as number and as string)[https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/tweets] so you still have access to the correct ID.

[particlebanana]

Yup that's correct. It's actually happening at the node-pg level. I think they expose their parsers if you really wanted to override it though.