Elliot West created AVRO-2638:
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Summary: IDL: Inconsistent field annotation behaviour
Key: AVRO-2638
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2638
Project: Apache Avro
Issue Type: Bug
Components: spec
Affects Versions: 1.8.2
Reporter: Elliot West
The interpretation of IDL field level annotations appears to be inconsistent
for different type structures. Specifically, if the field type is {{union}} the
the declaration of annotations is particularly sensitive to the location of
said annotations with respect to the type. For example:
In this case, with a primitive field type, {{myannotation}} is interpreted as a
field annotation:
{code}
@myannotation
string my_field;
{code}
However, in the case of a {{union}} field type, {{myannotation}} is *not*
interpreted as a field annotation:
{code}
@myannotation
{ null, string } my_field;
{code}
Instead, for the {{union}} case, one must declare the annotation between the
field type and name, for it to be attributed to the field:
{code}
{ null, string }
@myannotation
my_field;
{code}
It is not clear to me from [the
documentation|http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/idl.html#minutiae_annotations]
what the expected behaviour is. However, the current behaviour is not ideal
because seemingly correct annotations silently fail to be attributed to fields.
I would expect one of the following behaviours would be preferable:
* Consistency: Preceding and mid-position works for all types
* Consistency: Either preceding or mid-position works, the other should
generate an error
* Inconsistent but fail fast: error thrown if annotation declared preceding a
{{union}} field type declaration
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