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Best practices for generative use cases adding semantics to references #789

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61 changes: 61 additions & 0 deletions jsonschema-core.xml
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Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -2139,6 +2139,67 @@
</cref>
</t>
</section>
<section title="Assigning semantic meaning to references.">
<t>
While the presence of references is expected to be transparent
to validation results, generative use cases such as code generators
and UI renderers often consider references semantically significant.
</t>
<t>
To make such use case-specific semantics explicit, the best practice
is to create an annotation keyword can be created for use in the same
schema object alongside of a reference keyword such as "$ref".
</t>
<figure>
<preamble>
For example, here is a hypothetical keyword for determining
whether a code generator should consider the reference
target to be a distinct class, and how those classes are related.
Note that this example is solely for illustrative purposes, and is
not intended to propose a functional code generation keyword.
</preamble>
<artwork>
<![CDATA[
{
"allOf": [
{
"classRelation": "is-a",
"$ref": "classes/base.json"
},
{
"$ref": "fields/common.json"
}
],
"properties": {
"foo": {
"classRelation": "has-a",
"$ref": "classes/foo.json"
},
"date": {
"$ref": "types/dateStruct.json",
}
}
}
]]>
</artwork>
</figure>
<t>
Here, this schema represents some sort of object-oriented class.
The first reference in the "allOf" is noted as the base class.
The second is not assigned a class relationship, meaning that the
code generator should combine the target's definition with this
one as if no reference were involved.
</t>
<t>
Looking at the properties, "foo" is flagged as object composition,
while the "date" property is not. It is simply a field with
sub-fields, rather than an instance of a distinct class.
</t>
<t>
This style of usage requires the annotation to be in the same object
as the reference, which must be recognizable as a reference.
</t>
</section>
</section>

<section title='Schema Re-Use With "$defs"' anchor="defs">
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