Guaranteed JSON data in message objects

[maratal]

Currently message object contains data field, which is described as:

data The message payload, if provided. Type: String, StringBuffer, JSON Object

In addition to that, message should contain (if applicable) JSON data field, ready to be parsed into platform specific object.

jsonData The message JSON payload, if applicable. Type: JSON Object data.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task by Unito

[maratal]

Originated from https://github.com/ably/ably-cocoa/pull/1405#discussion_r872292403 @QuintinWillison @lawrence-forooghian

[maratal]

I was trying to put this new property into the documentation, but after inspecting docs sources structure some questions were raised on jsonData implementation. These are possible types for data in /ably-docs/content/realtime/messages.textile:

default: String, StringBuffer, JSON Object
java: String, ByteArray, JSONObject, JSONArray
csharp: String, byte[], plain C# object that can be serialized to JSON
ruby: String, Binary (ASCII-8BIT String), Hash, Array
python: String, Bytearray, Dict, List
php: String, Binary String, Associative Array, Array
objc: NSString *, NSData *, NSDictionary *, NSArray *
swift: String, NSData, Dictionary, Array
flutter: String, Map, List

And if c# has this "plain C# object that can be serialized to JSON" which is similar to NSData for Objective-C and Swift in this case, then how it should behave in other languages? Fallback to just String? Or maybe it's just not needed in other languages? @lawrence-forooghian @QuintinWillison

[lawrence-forooghian]

Can we leave that for individual implementations to decide? We can say that they should use whatever type is most appropriate in that language for representing raw binary data. The existing IDL makes a couple of references to a type called Binary (which it doesn't actually define as far as I can see), perhaps we could use that type?

[QuintinWillison]

My understanding of "plain C# object that can be serialized to JSON" is that it is not similar to NSData in Objective-C/Swift. In the Objective-C case, an NSData instance is classically the carrier of JSON-encoded data, as accepted by NSJSONSerialization's JSONObjectWithData:options:error: method which returns a 'Foundation object' which renders the following translations:

Input JSON	Output Foundation Object
object	NSDictionary instance
array	NSArray instance
string value	NSString instance
number value	NSNumber instance
true or false	NSNumber instance
null	NSNull singleton

So, I wonder if there's some conflation of concepts here. I'm a little confused as to what the question that's being asked is. 😕

[sync-by-unito[bot]]

➤ Automation for Jira commented:

The link to the corresponding Jira issue is https://ably.atlassian.net/browse/SDK-2757