Fix #7580 by documenting union schema evolution rules (#7585)

Co-authored-by: Casper Neo <cneo@google.com>
This commit is contained in:
Casper
2022-10-17 17:49:28 -04:00
committed by GitHub
parent e1c5db988a
commit 04cd037ba2

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@@ -552,7 +552,7 @@ the world. If this is not practical for you, use explicit field ids, which
should always generate a merge conflict if two people try to allocate the same
id.
### Schema evolution examples
### Schema evolution examples (tables)
Some examples to clarify what happens as you change a schema:
@@ -614,6 +614,41 @@ Occasionally ok. You've renamed fields, which will break all code (and JSON
files!) that use this schema, but as long as the change is obvious, this is not
incompatible with the actual binary buffers, since those only ever address
fields by id/offset.
#### Schema evolution examples (unions)
Suppose we have the following schema:
```
union Foo { A, B }
```
We can add another variant at the end.
```
union Foo { A, B, another_a: A }
```
and this will be okay. Old code will not recognize `another_a`.
However if we add `another_a` anywhere but the end, e.g.
```
union Foo { A, another_a: A, B }
```
this is not okay. When new code writes `another_a`, old code will
misinterpret it as `B` (and vice versa). However you can explicitly
set the union's "discriminant" value like so:
```
union Foo { A = 1, another_a: A = 3, B = 2 }
```
This is okay.
```
union Foo { original_a: A = 1, another_a: A = 3, B = 2 }
```
Renaming fields will break code and any saved human readable representations,
such as json files, but the binary buffers will be the same.
<br>
### Testing whether a field is present in a table