CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jsonswaggerswagger-2.0
xarlymg89
xarlymg89

Reputation: 2617

Swagger parse associative array with undefined properties

I'm trying to figure out how to achieve for Swagger to parse an associative array with an undefined number of values.

I have similar cases, with the difference that these other cases are totally regular (I know in advance all the properties' names). However, I might not know (actually I don't want to know) which could be the name of the values in these case.

Example of JSON that has an associative array with an undefined number of language codes. Each language code key, has an array of undefined translations, with a key and a value for each translations. "DESCRIPTION" and "ACCESS_ON_FOOT" in this case are the keys of the translations. But there could be others and I don't want to know all of them. It's supposed to be dynamic.

 {
  "ca": {
    "DESCRIPTION": "Catalan description",
    "ACCESS_ON_FOOT": "Catalan Access on foot"
  },
  "en": {
    "DESCRIPTION": "English Description",
    "ACCESS_ON_FOOT": "English Access on foot"
  },
  "es": {
    "DESCRIPTION": "Spanish Description",
    "ACCESS_ON_FOOT": "Spanish Access on foot"
  }
}

The thing is that I don't know how to specify this example of undefined language codes as the values of an object.

I my other case, I made it work easily, since I knew which values I had. I of course could add "ca", "en" and "es" as properties of type array. But if I add languages, I should come back to the Swagger spec and make it again, and my idea is to make the process of adding a new language totally decoupled of the API spec.

Is there a way of defining in Swagger 2.0 an undetermined set of properties?

UPDATE

It seems this could be a possible solution to the issue I'm having to parse this JSON:

Translations:
type: "object"
additionalProperties:
  type: object
  additionalProperties:
    type: string

The additionalProperties option seems to be the right one for associative arrays. At least according to the specification: https://swagger.io/docs/specification/data-models/dictionaries/

The Swagger Editor (https://editor.swagger.io/) is showing to me the same JSON format I described, but I still get an empty output in the generated client.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1811

Answers (1)

xarlymg89
xarlymg89

Reputation: 2617

After doing more research, it seems unclear to me that associative arrays are working in Swagger 2.0. I'd love to make this work. At the end I have opted to go for a different alternative, and made my API endpoint return a slightly different result.

I had an associative array with 2 dimensions and the value stored.

Now I have a unidimensional array with 3 properties:

Translations:
type: "object"
properties:
  language_code:
    type: "string"
  type:
    type: "string"
  content:
    type: "string"

As Translations is in the definitions set, I can easily include an array of Translations in the response of the endpoint like that:

responses:
    200:
      description: "successful operation"
      schema:
        type: "array"
        items:
          $ref: "#/definitions/Translations"

This worked like a charm.

Swagger seems to work very nicely, as long as you don't have cases where there is too much freedom. When that happens, you'd need to change your mind and find a different alternative to do things.

P.S. Start first with your API definition, (like you would do with tests and then code). So first API definition, then tests and then code.

Upvotes: 0

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