GenericRecord and null value

["Stephane L." <sl...@gmail.com>]

For a project we are investigating using Avro as the format for
serializing/de-serializing data. I am currently testing with Avro 1.1.

I have been playing with GenericRecord and I have noticed that if I define a
schema and let's say for example one property is an array, I will get a
NullPointerException if at serialization time I did not put any data for
that particular field aka myRecord.get("array") --> return null.

So my question is : when using a GenericRecord is it mandatory that all
fields specified in the schema to be non null when serializiation is
happening ?

Stéphane

Re: GenericRecord and null value

[Doug Cutting <cu...@apache.org>]

To permit null values you must use a union with null.

For example, if you want a field to be either an array of integers or 
null, then its type should be:

   ["null", {"type": "array", "items": "int"}]

Doug

Stephane L. wrote:
> For a project we are investigating using Avro as the format for 
> serializing/de-serializing data. I am currently testing with Avro 1.1.
> 
> I have been playing with GenericRecord and I have noticed that if I 
> define a schema and let's say for example one property is an array, I 
> will get a NullPointerException if at serialization time I did not put 
> any data for that particular field aka myRecord.get("array") --> return 
> null.
> 
> So my question is : when using a GenericRecord is it mandatory that all 
> fields specified in the schema to be non null when serializiation is 
> happening ? 
> 
> Stéphane