Feature request: add .example to ZodType

[gerardolima]

Motivation

Zod schemas can be leveraged to automatically generate API information (ie, nestjs-zod). This is very convenient because it allows defining the validation schema and the API documentation in a single place. As Zod does not have the concept of an .example value, these toolings rely on .default values to present sample values. Unfortunately, though, this breaks the semantics of .default, on .parse.

Goal

Create the new method .example() on ZodType.

Suggestion

• x.example(anyValue) // setter
• x.example() // getter

[NextThread]

hi, I'd like to work on this

[gerardolima]

hi, I'd like to work on this

if this feat should be accepted to add to Zod, I'd be available to work on this too

[olalonde]

I'm using zod to validate my app's configuration and it could be useful to automatically generate a help message, e.g. display which values correspond to which environment variables.

I wonder if instead, it wouldn't be better to have something more generic like meta which other tools could use to retrieved metadata.

x.meta({
  example: "some example",
  help: "Some help message, e.g. this value corresponds to this ENV_VARIABLE"
}); 
x.meta()