python-jsonschema / python-jsonschema/jsonschema

Validation errors should be able to indicate that a single error should be produced without collecting all of the details ahead of time

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Dialects v2 Enhancement Error Reporting
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Description

In general, validation is lazy -- if only one error is needed (in the sense that it is known that an instance is invalid), only one is produced.

There are however (somewhat unintentional) exceptions.

E.g.:

  • anyOf and oneOf calculate the .context of the first error they yield by calculating all sub-errors that were generated. This is because ValidationError.context needs to be provided on __init__.
  • dependentRequired, on the other hand, yields many errors, one for each missing required property (see also #119)

What's happening in these situations is that the validation function knows an error has occurred -- it wants to yield an error, but in order to do so, it needs to calculate the full details required so that the error is "complete".

We should instead have a way to indicate a validation error has occurred, but delay fully calculating its contents until/unless they are requested.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing the validation paths for anyOf, oneOf, and dependentRequired, then inspect how ValidationError.init receives context. Done means a validation error can be yielded without collecting all sub-errors, while its full contents are calculated only when requested.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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