Suport for data attributes that can be of different types

[samuelramos]

Hi,

This is something that started from AVRO contract need. Considering that in AVRO a field can be a union of one or even more complex types, how that could be represented on the YAML data contract?

Thanks,
SR

[jochenchrist]

Hi @samuelramos,

There is just limited support for union types:

• If you use union for optional / nullable types "type" : ["null", "string"], this is supported in AVRO import, test, and export with required: false.
• Data Contract Specification 1.2.0 introduced the variant Data Type that could be used (I have not tested this with Avro)

Supporting real union types, as well as JSON Schema's oneOf or anyOf might probably not come in the near future.

Same for Bitol ODCS.

[samuelramos]

Hmm, Thanks for the quick reply @jochenchrist

On AVRO it behaves more or less like a JSON oneof. A record can have one of multiple possible types. The message then specifies the name of the type to consider.

I have a fork of repo where I'm having some tweaks to write/read the avro. And I was thinking about a data contract customization to try accomodate such scenario.