I want to be able to

• create and send a Zod instance as a serialized JSON.
• receive such a JSON and parse it back to a Zod instance.

Problem: On the receiving part using Zod Schema parse throws error

ZodError: [
  {
    "code": "invalid_type",
    "expected": "string",
    "received": "object",
    "path": [
      0,
      "parents",
      0
    ],
    "message": "Expected string, received object"
  },

Workaround:

Sending part:
Remap all references as Zod expects those to be list of string ids instead of objects.

export async function GET() {
    const dbPersons = await getCollection("person");
    const persons = dbPersons.map((dbPerson) => {
        // Only this line causes the error above
        return dbPerson.data;
        // Workaround which works
        const parents = dbPerson.data.parents?.map(parent => parent.id);
        const children = dbPerson.data.children?.map(child => child.id);
        const spouses = dbPerson.data.spouses?.map(spouse => spouse.id);
        return Object.assign({}, {
            ...dbPerson.data,
            parents,
            children,
            spouses
        });
    });
    return new Response(JSON.stringify(persons));
}

Receiving part:

const personAPIResp = await personsApi.json();
const persons = await ZPersonArray.parseAsync(personAPIResp);

Affected part of the schema:

export const ZPerson = z.object({
    id: z.number({
        message: "Unique identifier of a person"
    }),
    // ...
    // Parents
    parents: z.array(reference("person")).optional(),
    // ...
});

Is there a better solution like a different parser or a different way to serialize?