Hi, I was confused about why the Avro compiler wasn't initializing my record's member variables with the default values I specified in my IDL/schema, and then I came across this thread which explained the issue:
http://search-hadoop.com/m/iDVTn1JVeSR1 In the above thread Doug made this comment: "Factory/builders are probably the best approach at present. Ideally we might generate accessor methods, track which fields have been set, and then set unset fields to their default values before writing." That sounds like a good approach, using mutators to track which fields have been set. Records could also implement the builder pattern, which would make it much more convenient to construct records by chaining setter invocations. It looks like there has been some discussion of this in AVRO-726 and AVRO-770, but there hasn't been much activity lately. Is anyone actively working on this? If no one has the time, I would be glad to work on a patch. -James
