[AVRO-695] Cycle Reference Support

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.7.6
• Fix Version/s: 1.8.0
• Component/s: spec
• Release Note: -Cyclic reference support
• Assignee: Ryan Blue
• Reporter: Moustapha Cherri
• Created: 15/Nov/10 16:01
• Updated: 04/Feb/16 22:53
• Resolved: 03/Feb/16 19:18

Description

This is a proposed implementation to add cycle reference support to Avro. It basically introduce a new type named Cycle. Cycles contains a string representing the path to the other reference.

For example if we have an object of type Message that have a member named previous with type Message too. If we have have this hierarchy:

message
previous : message2

message2
previous : message2

When serializing the cycle path for "message2.previous" will be "previous".

The implementation depend on ANTLR to evaluate those cycle at read time to resolve them. I used ANTLR 3.2. This dependency is not mandated; I just used ANTLR to speed thing up. I kept in this implementation the generated code from ANTLR though this should not be the case as this should be generated during the build. I only updated the Java code.

I did not make full unit testing but you can find "avrotest.Main" class that can be used a preliminary test.

Please do not hesitate to contact me for further clarification if this seems interresting.

Best regards,
Moustapha Cherri