[jira] [Commented] (AVRO-1335) ResolvingDecoder should provide bidirectional compatibility between different version of schemas

["Scott Carey (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1335?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13662642#comment-13662642 ] 

Scott Carey commented on AVRO-1335:
-----------------------------------

The second record must specify a default value for the added field:

{code}

{
"name": "Version2",
"type": "string",
"default":""
}
{code}

Otherwise, when reading with the second schema, and there is no data for field "Version2" in the data written with the first schema, what do you want it to do?

The Avro specification uses default values to handle the use case where a field is present for the reader but not the writer.

                
> ResolvingDecoder should provide bidirectional compatibility between different version of schemas
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: AVRO-1335
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1335
>             Project: Avro
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: c++
>    Affects Versions: 1.7.4
>            Reporter: Bin Guo
>
> We found that resolvingDecoder could not provide bidirectional compatibility between different version of schemas.
> Especially for records, for example:
> {code:title=First schema}
> {
>     "type": "record",
>     "name": "TestRecord",
>     "fields": [
>         {
>             "name": "MyData",
> 			"type": {
> 				"type": "record",
> 				"name": "SubData",
> 				"fields": [
> 					{
> 						"name": "Version1",
> 						"type": "string"
> 					}
> 				]
> 			}
>         },
> 	{
>             "name": "OtherData",
>             "type": "string"
>         }
>     ]
> }
> {code}
> {code:title=Second schema}
> {
>     "type": "record",
>     "name": "TestRecord",
>     "fields": [
>         {
>             "name": "MyData",
> 			"type": {
> 				"type": "record",
> 				"name": "SubData",
> 				"fields": [
> 					{
> 						"name": "Version1",
> 						"type": "string"
> 					},
> 					{
> 						"name": "Version2",
> 						"type": "string"
> 					}
> 				]
> 			}
>         },
> 	{
>             "name": "OtherData",
>             "type": "string"
>         }
>     ]
> }
> {code}
> Say, node A knows only the first schema and node B knows the second schema, and the second schema has more fields. 
> Any data generated by node B can be resolved by first schema 'cause the additional field is marked as skipped.
> But data generated by node A can not be resolved by second schema and throws an exception *"Don't know how to handle excess fields for reader."*
> This is because data is resolved exactly according to the auto-generated codec_traits which trying to read the excess field.
> The problem is we just can not only ignore the excess field in record, since the data after the troublesome record also needs to be resolved.
> Actually this problem stucked us for a very long time.

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