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Result Variant Only

Focus on response shaping for outbound APIs:

zod-generator.config.json
{
  "mode": "custom",
  "variants": {
    "pure": { "enabled": false },
    "input": { "enabled": false },
    "result": { "enabled": true, "suffix": ".result" }
  },
  "emit": {
    "objects": false,
    "crud": false,
    "pureModels": false,
    "variants": true,
    "enums": true
  }
}

This emits only variants/result/<Model>.result.ts plus the enums those schemas reference.

The emit block is what makes the recipe live up to its name. emit.objects and emit.crud both default to true, and the heuristics that suppress them (pureModelsOnlyMode, pureVariantOnlyMode) require pureModels to be truthy — so without these flags a result-only config still writes the whole objects/ + CRUD + results/ surface alongside variants/result/.

Two different "result" artifacts

variants/result/<Model>.result.ts (the result variant, gated by emit.variants plus variants.result.enabled) and results/<Model><Op>Result.schema.ts (per-operation result schemas) are separate outputs.

Per-operation result schemas are generated as part of the CRUD pass, so they require emit.crud to stay enabled — "crud": false above suppresses them regardless of what emit.results says. If you want results/ instead, keep emit.crud: true and accept that the CRUD argument schemas are emitted alongside it; see CRUD Only.

Relation fields​

The two artifacts treat relation fields differently.

In variants/result/<Model>.result.ts, relation fields are emitted as z.unknown() (or z.array(z.unknown()) for to-many relations), with .nullable() appended for optional relations.

In results/<Model><Op>Result.schema.ts, a relation field references the related pure model schema when that model is emitted — z.array(TagSchema).optional() for to-many, ProfileSchema.optional() for to-one — imported from ../models/ (v2.3.2). Relations are always .optional() there because they only appear in a response when the query explicitly includes them. The schema falls back to z.unknown().optional() when:

  • pure models are not being emitted (pureModels falsy or emit.pureModels: false), so there is no models/ file to import;
  • the relation is a self-relation, which would otherwise need a cyclic import;
  • single-file mode is active, because result schemas are inlined into the bundle before the pure models they would reference.

Under jsonSchemaCompatible: true the fallback is z.any() instead of z.unknown().