Github user cestella commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-metron/pull/333
@ottobackwards Thanks so much for the review.
Yeah, it's a general question about stellar functions about when to error
versus when to tolerate. We have traditionally tried to be as permissive as
possible about errors that are associated with missing data. I think you can
make an argument for malformed URLs to be a proper error, but it has
historically not been mostly because it was considered a semantic error. The
original concern was you might want to transform fields which were
inconsistently populated or populated with default values some of the time. In
that case, if the field is malformed then the URL that it produced should be
`null`. You still have the original field and can make decisions downstream in
enrichment or threat triage.
Contrasting that would be syntactic or systemic errors, like passing in a
number when you intended a string. These would indicate a high likelihood of
misconfiguration, so should be errors. This was the original thinking behind
when stellar functions error and when they tolerate variable input.
I think it is high time to provide an `EXCEPTION` function so you can
choose to throw an exception under certain circumstances if you want a more
conservative interpretation of error.
---
If your project is set up for it, you can reply to this email and have your
reply appear on GitHub as well. If your project does not have this feature
enabled and wishes so, or if the feature is enabled but not working, please
contact infrastructure at [email protected] or file a JIRA ticket
with INFRA.
---
