Pull required references from referenced projects.

Search Terms

Inherit references from referenced project.
Pull required references from referenced projects.

Suggestion

I have projects that have references to other projects, but one other project has references to another project it is dependent on. That seems to be completely ignored, and is causing compiler errors. It forces me to have to know all the references of the referenced projects and pull those also, which I should not have to do.

Use Cases

This is pretty obvious. In a typical C# project in Visual Studio (for example), referencing a project resolves other references from that referenced project, and so on. It is not good practice to force projects to pull direct dependencies that are referenced indirectly by 3rd parties.

Examples

tsconfig.json

{
  "references": [
    { "path": "3rdPartyProject" } // 3rdPartyProjectFile.d.ts
  ],

3rdPartyProject/tsconfig.json

{
  "references": [
    { "path": "Another3rdPartyProject" } // Another3rdPartyProjectFile.d.ts
  ],

This setup only outputs 3rdPartyProjectFile.d.ts, as required by the first referenced projects. Intellisense fails, however, because the references in 3rdPartyProject/tsconfig.json are not included, thus Another3rdPartyProjectFile.d.ts is missing. This forces me to open all related tsconfig references and pollute my project json with them. This also may not scale well.

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
• This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, etc.)
• This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

Start with the referenced-project entries in tsconfig.json and 3rdPartyProject/tsconfig.json, focusing on how IntelliSense resolves the generated .d.ts files. Trace why Another3rdPartyProjectFile.d.ts is not included through the transitive reference. Done means indirect project references are available without duplicating them in the root project configuration.