Docs need updated to clarify `bigint` behavior.

[alexd-femmi]

Hi there,

I have a fresh install of strava-v3, and I have noticed when fetching activities, some of my coordinates returned (not all, and not every time either) are not coming back as numbers, but a bignumber object. This has been breaking things in production for us.

Is this a known issue, and is there any chance of a fix? bignumber.js is at 9.3.1 with a fresh install, hopefully that's helpful.

Thanks in advance!

[markstos]

Look at the size of the numbers that are and are not coming back as numbers vs objects.

Compare that to the max Integer size for JavaScript.

The Strava API returns numbers that are larger then the maximum Integer size that JavaScript supports, so it's not possible for this module to do anything JavaScript can't do. The best we can do is to use "bignumber" for very large numbers.

If you feel like there's a solvable issue with the module please provide examples of numbers we are misparsing.

[alexd-femmi]

It seems like bignumber isn't converting them at all - it's returning them as, for example

 [
        {
          "s": 1,
          "c": [
            176,
            17596700000001
          ],
          "e": 2,
          "_isBigNumber": true
        },
        -37.674942
      ]

This is a new issue, since a fresh install will use the latest version of some underlying packages I'm guessing? But I'm not sure. I can loop through the coords and convert them using bignumber.js myself, but I feel like this package was once doing it and now somehow isn't?

[markstos]

It seems like bignumber isn't converting them at all

Yes, bignumber is converting the values from numbers so big that JavaScript can't understand them into an bigint object, which can at least be used by code which understands this instead of throwing an exception.

I'm not sure what you expect bigint to convert the numbers /to/. As mentioned, it can't return them as numbers because JavaScript doesn't support numbers that large. According to the related ticket, if you call .toString() on a Bigint object, it will return the numbers as a string:

#154

It's possible that the reason it worked for you before is that you were selecting Strava data with smaller IDs and just now you are getting to newer Strava data with numbers larger than JavaScript should handle.

It seems like we are doing the best we can here. Strava could have returned their IDs as strings, but they chose to return them as numbers, and JavaScript could have been designed to handle huge ints, but it is not.

If there's a bug here it's the PR that introduced bigint didn't document the behavior anywhere. But before we had that PR, JavaScript would crash when trying to parse these numbers, so this at least an improvement.

[markstos]

Patch welcome to improve the docs.