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Unify path handling

Open sdirix opened this issue 2 years ago • 0 comments

At the moment we maintain two different paths in JSON Forms:

  • The scope JSON Pointer paths used in UI Schema to resolve to subschemas of the handed over JSON Schema
  • The dot-separated path paths (lodash format) to resolve to entries in the form-wide data object

The JSON Pointers are well defined and JSON Forms support escaping of their special characters (/ and ~). The dot-separated paths however don't support escaping, leading to errors when a . is contained within the path. This was already reported in #1631 and #1849

To fix the issues and to harmonize path handling in JSON Forms we should settle on JSON Pointers for all paths. As a consequence data paths would change from person.name to /person/name.

Benefits:

  • Well defined path format for which we already support escaping
  • By keeping the data path as a string (in contrary to changing it to an array) we preserve memoization in the application frameworks (especially React, Vue).
  • No more converting between paths, for example can be easily compared to AJV's JSON Pointers

Downside:

  • Breaks custom code which manually modified or created paths

Therefore it should be released only with a 4.0 version and be mentioned in the MIGRATION guide.

sdirix avatar Jun 29 '23 11:06 sdirix