Key values in object metadata are stringified

[thclark]

Bug report

What is the current behavior?

A number of object metadata items (id, hash_value, any null items) in gcloud storage are stringified rather than provided as raw values. For example the id field comprises the string "45bf3bcb-92b0-45eb-9067-d8ecd173083d" with quotation marks as opposed to the string literal 45bf3bcb-92b0-45eb-9067-d8ecd173083d.

This prevents indexing/search in a data lake, and makes it very weird to create sdk-compatible file entries somewhere other than from the SDK.

What is the expected behavior?

String items to appear without quotation marks, null values to appear as empty:

Your environment

• Library Version: 0.1.5
• Platform n/a

[cortadocodes]

The reason this happens is that the metadata is JSON encoded by the SDK; I'll see if we still need to do this!

[cortadocodes]

JSON encoding the metadata made getting and setting the metadata a bit smoother. Without it, we need to explicitly convert metadata to strings on upload and metadata strings to the right types on download.