Constant value fields

[benjelloun]

It's often useful to associate key-value pairs at the level of a RecordSet. We propose doing that by adding a "value" property to Field that allows it to have a fixed value.

This is similar to the "data" property of RecordSet, that makes it possible to specify the values (records) contained in a RecordSet directly in the Croissant definition.

The "value" of a Field can be atomic, for Fields with a simple dataType, or it can be structured, in case the Field has SubFields. For the latter case, a JSON string can be used to represent the value.

[csbrown]

Do you have a specific example use case where this would be helpful?

[csbrown]

@benjelloun could I get some advice here? It looks like I'll need to update the Field description in the 1.1 spec here. I'll also need to update the field node code here and possibly the editor code here? Are there any other tools that might need to be updated and tested to work with a value property?

I am seeing some tests for Field formatting that I can add to here. It looks like the testing apparatus involves a half dozen different frameworks, not all of which I'm familiar with, so suggestions on how to test this would be 💯

[csbrown]

Also, would like to recommend that the 1.1 spec be a new branch rather than a parallel file. This will help with the code and spec being in sync (viz. should we update 1.0 spec code to support 1.1 spec?)

[csbrown]

It looks like @value is a keyword in JSON-LD that we had maybe ought to leverage here.

[benjelloun]

Adding the value property to Field in the draft spec in #951