Problem with document creation REST API: document JSON properties in a collection are ignored

[russtrotter_]

Here's my setup:

• schema "myschema" defined as single field named "list" of type Complex that is multi-valued
• the complex sub-schema has 2 string fields "foo" and "bar", neither are multi-valued
• document type "mydoc" that references this schema
• modify creation/edit layouts for the document type to use a list widget on the "myschema" schema
• in Nuxeo DM, create a "mydoc" document titled "mydocinstance" (for testing, i hit the "Add" trigger on the UI and plug in the values "test1" and "test2" for the foo/bar fields respectively)

With that setup I do a GET /nuxeo/api/v1/path/default-domain/workspaces/ws/mydocinstance and get the following JSON:

{
...
  "myschema:list":[
     {
     "foo":"test1",
     "bar":"test2"
     }
  ]
...
}

Now POST to the same API to create a new document: POST /nuxeo/api/v1/path/default-domain/workspaces/ws/mynewinstance

{
...
   "myschema:list":[
         {
         "foo":"testA",
         "bar":"testB"
         }
      ]
    ...
    }

Up to this point, everything looks good, but the problem appears when I GET that new document, e.g. GET /nuxeo/api/v1/path/default-domain/workspaces/ws/mynewinstance and I get:

{
    ...
       "myschema:list":[]
     ...
}

Why do the myschema:foo and myschema:bar sub-properties get ignored in JSON POSTed?

[russtrotter_]

Fun, answering my own questions! k, this one took some time, but thanks to Nuxeo DM source being freely available and a debugger, I can now do what i was trying to do!

First off, the TL;DR solution: All fields in the JSON nxentity "properties" map MUST be strings, thus if you are trying to set a complex property, the JSON structure of that complex property MUST be escaped.

For example, in my examples above, I need to escape the JSON subtree of the "myschema:list" property so what gets PUT to the REST API should be:

{
    "properties": {
        "myschema:list": "[{\"foo\":\"myfoo\",\"bar\":\"mybar\"}]"
    }
}

UPDATE: I'm editing my original answer since the Nuxeo folks have fixed this behavior with hotfix release nuxeo-5.8.0-HF01-1.0.0. This update should not require the treatment of the complex fields as strings.

[Florent_Guillau]

That's not supposed to be the case. You should get proper and readable JSON. I'll raise the issue internally.

[russtrotter_]

This behavior seems to only be the case when sending the JSON nxentity via PUT or POST. On a GET request, the JSON that is returned is "sane" and doesn't require this kind of escaping.

[Florent_Guillau]

Ok but you should be able to send normal JSON as well. That's the goal of these new APIs.

[Damien_Metzler]

I've created a ticket here