BSON returns Binary when deserializing what was originally a UInt8Array. But Why?

I’ve been working on a module to persist the Pinia store for Vue.js - there are a few, but I want one that works for sync and async storage - localStorage and IndexedDB for example.

While working on that, I noticed serialization issues when storing objects directly into localStorage. So I started using JSON and it worked pretty well until I needed to serialize AND deserialize UInt8Arrays. So BSON for the rescue!

Not so fast! For reasons unknown to me and mankind, BSON by default thinks deserializing an UInt8Array as something that looks veeery similar but is of type Binary is fine and dandy. But it’s not.

Psst: it might have to do that BSON was made for Node.js, and not for client-side use. But that’s where I want to use it.

Because I was running into issues working on IPFS stuff serializing private keys and what not. I was using the web3.storage interface and it for sure what not happy with getting a Binary instead of an UInt8Array.

What to do?

Idea one: convert it. Yes that works. Something like this:

const object = BSON.deserialize(data);
const array = new UInt8Array(Buffer.from(object.array.buffer));

Note: I don’t remember exactly because I deleted the code before writing this. Why? Because you don’t need it! So forget it. :D

This was just a little writer’s trick to create suspense which of course is pretty useless now with all that explaining I did. Okay. Moving on!

After playing around with the configuration options of BSON, there is a way to convince BSON to just return the array type it got.

So here it is, the magic line, behold!

BSON.deserialize(data, { promoteBuffers: true });

Promote buffers! Yes! Promote whatever you like but give me an UInt8Arrays when I gave you one and all will be good. Thank you. :D