If you use the jesse application for JSON schema validation, you will no doubt be mystified by the byzantine way that references are handled in the application. I spent well over 30 hours trying to figure it out, since it is totally undocumented what the format should be.
I tried to make things as simple as possible. I had a file with the "base" schema for an item. I called it record.json It looked something like this:
{
"id": "record",
"description": "Base schema for a valid record",
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"foo": {
"type": "string"
},
"bar": {
"type": "number"
}
}
}And then I had another file which took a collection of these items. It looked like this:
{
"id": "records-bulk",
"description": "A collection of records",
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"records": {
"type": "array",
"items": { "$ref": "record" }
}
}
}The intention here is clear - I want to reuse the schema for record as the elements in an array. For example, this is a valid input against the schema:
{
"records": [
{
"foo": "hoge",
"bar": 42
},
{
"foo": "qux",
"bar": 19.2
}
]
}But how to communicate this to jesse? Well, it turns out that jesse canonicalizes your references - it insists on prefixing your ids with a URL - either "http://" or "file://". So to make this work in jesse, I needed to prefix both my ids with "file://" and then always reuse "file://record" anytime I wanted to use it elsewhere.
Apparently it is not possible to have "naked" references for reasons I can't possibly fathom. I might open a PR about this because it almost beggars imagination.