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Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 03:32:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Jeff Hodges (JIRA)" <jira@apache.org>
To: avro-dev@hadoop.apache.org
Subject: [jira] Created: (AVRO-530) allow for mutual recursion in type
 definitions
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allow for mutual recursion in type definitions
----------------------------------------------

                 Key: AVRO-530
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-530
             Project: Avro
          Issue Type: Improvement
          Components: spec
    Affects Versions: 1.3.2
            Reporter: Jeff Hodges


Suppose you have these two types in your protocol:

{code}
{"name": "User", "type": "record", "fields": [{"name": "current_status", "type": "Status"}]}

{"name": "Status", "type": "record", "fields": [{"name": "author", "type": "User"}]}
{code}

This will raise an error! The current workaround is to define one of them at their first usage. Like:

{code}
{"name": "User", "type": "record", "fields": [{"name": "current_status", "type": {"name": "Status", "type": "record", "fields": [.. lots of fields ...]}]}
{code}

But this is incredibly unwieldy. It would be really nice for the spec to require all the parsers to allow for mutual recursion, instead. It could be done by implementing a two-pass parser. One pass to acquire names referenced, and a second to fill in those names with their appropriate references.


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