I would not be opposed to adding inheritance in IDL.
FWIW, another way to represent sub-types is through a union field in
the "super" record, i.e.:
record Shape {
int x;
int y;
union subFields { CircleFields, SquareFields }
}
record CircleFields {
int radius;
}
record SquareFields {
int size;
}
Then you only need to use instanceof and casts for operations that are
specific to sub-types.
Doug
On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Alexandre Normand
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hey,
> I'm wondering what you guys think of adding support for inheritance in avro
> IDL. We're starting to see unions of different types in our code and they
> mostly have the same fields. We're basically using unions to do inheritance
> except that the code that uses it remains cumbersome. The client code needs
> to do instanceof just to cast to the proper type in order to retrieve a value
> that is actually present in all types of the union.
>
> It seems like this could be hidden from client by just creating a union of
> all types extending a parent type defined for a field and generating sources
> with that type.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> --
> Alex
>
