Required attribute of properties defined as stringArray

[MonsJovis]

I marked properties of one of my schema objects as required.

"definitions": {
 "Credentials": {
 "title": "Credentials",
 "properties": {
 "client_id": {
 "type": "string",
 "required": true
 },
 "client_secret": {
 "type": "string",
 "required": true
 },
 "username": {
 "type": "string",
 "required": true
 },
 "password": {
 "type": "string",
 "required": true
 }
}

The validator says the value of required has to be a stringArray:

[ {
 "level" : "error",
 "schema" : {
 "loadingURI" : "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#",
 "pointer" : "/definitions/stringArray"
 },
 "instance" : {
 "pointer" : "/definitions/Credentials/properties/client_id/required"
 },
 "domain" : "validation",
 "keyword" : "type",
 "message" : "instance type (boolean) does not match any allowed primitive type (allowed: [\"array\"])",
 "found" : "boolean",
 "expected" : [ "array" ]
} ]

So I'm wondering why the required attribute of properties is defined as stringArray?

"required": {
 "$ref": "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#/definitions/stringArray"
}

[mohsen1]

This is how JSON Schema works. See this example:

{
 "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#",
 "title": "Product",
 "description": "A product from Acme's catalog",
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
 "id": {
 "description": "The unique identifier for a product",
 "type": "integer"
 }
 },
 "required": ["id"]
}

More info here

[MonsJovis]

@mohsen1 It works! Great! Thanks! But isn't it a little bit confusing defining the required attribute of the parameters as boolean and the required attribute of the schema properties as array?

[webron]

@MonsJovis - for models, we basically use a subset (fsvo 'subset) of json schema which defines 'required' that way. The rest of the spec is built based on our own design and it doesn't necessarily adhere to the json-schema design.

We can argue which is better ;)

[MonsJovis]

@webron ok :) Thanks for explaining!

[ePaul]

The error message is still misleading, as the required attribute is not just of the wrong type, but also at the wrong location. So I guess a better message would be "there is no required attribute for properties".

[webron]

We don't really control the validation error messages.