There should be a way to include a common base into a document

[matthewfl]

Currently I have added something to pre-filter the json when it is loaded for a $include, that will load in another file and merge the object that the $include is in and the file that it is referencing.

Example:

base.json

{
  "first": { . . . }
}

element.json

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "$include": "base.json",
        "second": { . . . }
    }
}

will result in a schema

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "first": { . . . },
        "second": { . . . }
    }
}

[Julian]

Hi.

This is what references and the $ref keyword are for. You can specify a URI for the base schema and it will be resolved.

[Julian]

Any luck?

[matthewfl]

Are there any examples doing this, as I tried using refs before for this purpose but I was unable to get them to work

[Julian]

Mostly you do {"$ref" : <some_uri_where_your_schema_lives>} in a place where a schema should go. I can elaborate further if you can show what you tried and how it failed.

[matthewfl]

Currently I am working on https://github.com/matthewfl/balanced-api/tree/rev1/responses/models
each file has the same id, href, created_at and updated fields. I tried using "allOf" and then having $ref but then there were issues with having the additional properties.

[Julian]

Ah. Yes, sorry, you're right then. JSON Schema does not currently have something like that that merges schemas. $ref is simply for referencing another schema wholesale.

There are numerous posts about it on the mailing list IIRC. There isn't a solution though, it's just a thing that doesn't exist right now, and needs some thought as to whether it's worth having.

With jsonschema (this library) though you're free to define your own validator, and call it $include, and have it do what you want though. The docs are a little sparse, but there's https://python-jsonschema.readthedocs.org/en/latest/creating/ which you can take a look at, and then peek at the source in jsonschema.validators to see an example.

[matthewfl]

I looked at trying to add it as a validator but the issue was that I was needing to basically preprocess the schema before it was sent to other validators. So currently I have it as a recursive function going over the whole schema before it is loaded.

[Julian]

That would be fine, or as a validator that happens in properties, so you can extend properties to first do your loading, then continue with the usual properties validation.