Came across this problem myself and in the end wrote a small library cloneable-ts that provides an abstract class, which adds a clone method to any class extending it. The abstract class borrows the Deep Copy Function described in the accepted answer by Fenton only replacing copy = {}; with copy = Object.create(originalObj) to preserve the class of the original object. Here is an example of using the class.
import {Cloneable, CloneableArgs} from 'cloneable-ts';
// Interface that will be used as named arguments to initialize and clone an object
interface PersonArgs {
readonly name: string;
readonly age: number;
}
// Cloneable abstract class initializes the object with super method and adds the clone method
// CloneableArgs interface ensures that all properties defined in the argument interface are defined in class
class Person extends Cloneable<TestArgs> implements CloneableArgs<PersonArgs> {
readonly name: string;
readonly age: number;
constructor(args: TestArgs) {
super(args);
}
}
const a = new Person({name: 'Alice', age: 28});
const b = a.clone({name: 'Bob'})
a.name // Alice
b.name // Bob
b.age // 28
Or you could just use the Cloneable.clone helper method:
import {Cloneable} from 'cloneable-ts';
interface Person {
readonly name: string;
readonly age: number;
}
const a: Person = {name: 'Alice', age: 28};
const b = Cloneable.clone(a, {name: 'Bob'})
a.name // Alice
b.name // Bob
b.age // 28