Meme transcription: Panel 1. Two images of JSON, one is the empty object, one is an object in which the key name maps to the value null. Caption: “Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture”

Panel 2. The Java backend dev answers, “They’re the same picture.”

  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    So it sounds like an issue with […] handling per-spec the presence of data which you don’t use.

    The trouble is, in this specific use case, the data may either be there or it may not be, depending on authorization. I’m checking specifically if the key is present to determine whether the user has access to that data (and display a toggle for that data), or if the user mustn’t see it and thus doesn’t need the toggle.

    The wrong assumption was that if the key is there, then the value is not null. That assumption was invalidated by an update on the server side. Of course I could’ve checked if the value of the key is nullish. But it’s still annoying to have a breaking frontend because the backend changed how it serves its data.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      That sounds like an error in the specification of the client-server API or an erroneous implementation on the server side for the last version: nothing should be signaled via presence or absence of fields when using JSON exactly because, as I described in my last post, the standard with JSON is that stuff that is not present should be ignore (i.e. it has no meaning at all) for backwards compatibility, which breaks if all of the sudden presence or absence are treated as having meaning.

      Frankly that there isn’t a specific field signalling authorized/not-authorized leads me to believe that whomever has designed that API isn’t exactly experienced at that level of software design: authorization information should be explicit, not implicit, otherwise you end up with people checking for not-in-spec side effects like you did exactly for that reason (i.e. “is the no data being returned because of user not authorized or because there was indeed no data to retunr?”), which is prone to break since not being properly part of the spec means any of the teams working on it might interpret things differently and/or change them at any moment.

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Frankly that there isn’t a specific field signalling authorized/not-authorized

        The instance I was bitching about was this: There’s a lot of region-specific data coming from the backend. But the user is only authorized for certain regions. So for instance the North-American guy gets this object: { "CA": [/* list of stuff */], "US": [/* list of stuff */], "MX": [ /* list of stuff */ ]}, while the US-only guy only gets {"US": [ /* list of stuff */] }. Are you suggesting that the response should also include flags isCaPresent, isUsPresent, isMxPresent for every country?

        The issue with null vs not present surfaced because I, the frontend, checked if the returned object contained the key "CA" and then tried to iterate over the list of stuff, which happened to be null, which is hard to iterate over. I agree that I could’ve checked if the key was present and not null.

        The meme, however, was lamenting that the backend developer, refuses to acknowledge that these two JSONs are different,since they only see their POJOs, where both map to CA: null, US: [], MX: null.