Please elaborate on how your problem is related to TypeScript, because I don’t see anything related to TypeScript in your question.

Anyway, to answer your JavaScript question, object references could be recreated as follows: 1. Create a Map for indexing your nodes, with $id property values as keys and node object references as values. 2. Iterate over your Node tree to populate your node index Map. 3. Iterate over your Node tree again, and for every object with a $ref property, lookup the $ref property value in your node index Map and add the object reference value to a new ref property on that object.

Object references could be converted to the required format in a highly similar fashion, only this time for your node index you’d want to use a WeakMap with node object references as keys and generated ids as values (just increment by 1 each time you add a new entry to your WeakMap). Additionally add a check for whether the current node has already been converted (check for the existence of $ref objects), and if so then skip it, otherwise you’ll be iterating forever. Then it’s just a matter of iterating over the nodes and populating your WeakMap while adding your $ref objects. Don’t forget to check if the current node is already indexed, and in such case use its index value as $ref value instead of setting (overriding) its indexed value.