Generate JSON Schema from dhall type

#1

I have a hypothetical use case where I want to:

  • have some kind of dhall type / schema (let’s call it Foo)
  • write instances of this type in dhall (as in let instance = Foo::{ ... })
  • generate a JSON schema for this type as well

I want both the outputs (as JSON/YAML) and the JSON schema, because I want to build a kubernetes CustomResource representing Foo, which I’d generate using a dhall pipeline, but I others would also publish (and not all would be using dhall).

There’s been some talk of generating dhall schemas from JSON schemas, but is the opposite possible?

I imagine you could easily write a dhall type for JSON schemas, i.e. allow writing JSON Schemas in dhall. But I want a single source which can be used to derive both a a JSON schema and a dhall type.

1 Like
Towards JSON schema from Dhall
#2

@timbertson: I like this idea! It seems doable, at least for the simple case where everything is “inline” (i.e. intermediate schemas are not named in the JSON schema).

#3

I’d also be happy with a third type - i.e. there’s some “schema for Foo” dhall term, which allows me to both generate JSON from a Foo instance and also generate a JSON schema while asserting that it matches the Foo type. It doesn’t seem possible to do that in dhall though, since it’d need recursion and probably the ability to turn a text value into a record key e.g. from "foo TextSchema", constructing{ foo: Text }`

But thinking further about it, using dhall types doesn’t feel like enough power – if you generate a schema from a raw dhall type, there’s no real place I can see to put extra annotations (validations that dhall’s type system can’t represent). I don’t need those, but if it’s supposed to be a generic tool it seems a shame to rule it out.

Which actually makes me come full circle to the thought that a tool which generates dall types from JSON schemas is going to cover more use cases :thinking: . I mean, you could write the “JSON Schema” in dhall form rather than unstructured JSON, but in practice it’d be able to parse raw JSONSchema (json-to-dhall ./schema < json | json-schema-to-dhall).

Which I’m guessing is sounding very similar to the dhall-kubernetes stuff?

#4

@timbertson: Your latter idea sounds similar in spirit to OpenAPI, which seems like the successor to JSON schema based on what little I know:

Perhaps we could generate Dhall types from OpenAPI schemas, which I believe has also been requested in other contexts.