Zoltan Ivanfi created AVRO-2087:
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Summary: Allow specifying default values for logical types in
human-readable form
Key: AVRO-2087
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2087
Project: Avro
Issue Type: New Feature
Reporter: Zoltan Ivanfi
Currently default values for logical types have to be specified as the binary
representation of the backing primary type.
For example, if one wanted to specify 0.00 as the default value for a decimal
field, "\u0000" has to be specified as the default value. If the user tries to
specify "0.00", like in AVRO-2086, it is silently accepted but results in
unexpected behaviour. This value is not parsed and interpreted as a decimal
number but is taken to be the byte representation, i.e. the corresponding
hexadecimal ASCII byte sequence 30 2E 30 30 = 808333360 with a precision of 2
results in a default decimal value of 8083333.60.
To set the default value to an arbitrary non-zero value, e.g., 31.80, one has
to multiply it by 10^2=100 for a precision of 2, resulting in 3180, which is
0x0C6C when converted to hex. This means that "\u000C\u006C" has to be
specified as the default value. Having to do these calculations by hand is not
too user (programmer) friendly.
For a date or timestamp type, the default value has to be specified as a number
and not as a string, so an unexpected default value can not be set accidentally
in this case. However, one can't use a human-readable representation in this
case either, the number of days or seconds (respectively) elapsed since the
epoch must be specified, e.g., 1507216329 for the current timestamp.
The first step towards solving this problem will be coming up with a suggested
solution. Once we have that, the JIRA description should be extended with
details.
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