How to add user-defined artifact metadata?

There may be metadata that users would like to have associated with an artifact stored in Apicurio that does not fit into any of the currently available metadata fields, which are:

• name (string)
• description (string)
• labels (array of strings)
• createdBy (string)
• createdOn (long)
• modifiedBy (string)
• modifiedOn (long)
• id (string)
• version (int)
• type (ArtifactType)
• globalId (long)
• state (ArtifactState)

It would be useful to have a metadata field that can contain more free-form user-definable information. The labels metadata field can hold a list of Strings, although these seem to be more akin to tags to be used for organization/searching and are displayed as such in the UI.

In the Kubernetes world, resources have name-value pairs in the metadata.labels field, which is often used to hold additional information about the resource.

Apicurio could add an extra metadata field for name-value pairs, perhaps named properties (or maybe additionalProperties? Naming is hard 😃 ) which would be defined as a Java Map<String, String> object. This would cover simple name-value pairs, although it wouldn’t allow more complex structures.

In addition to user-defined metadata, the ibmcompat API has fields in it’s metadata objects that don’t easily map to the Apicurio artifact metadata fields (such as the schema name (1) and state.comment fields (2)). Rather than adding those fields directly to the artifact metadata, a properties field could hold the information internally, and the ibmcompat API implementation could populate the additional fields using that data.

I’d be interested to hear what people think about this, and happy to provide a PR if it’s though to be a good idea.

(1) https://github.com/Apicurio/apicurio-registry/blob/b7f2f41225be57ac7ed1e99c6aa94bed4e302332/app/src/main/java/io/apicurio/registry/ibmcompat/model/SchemaSummary.java#L35-L40 (2) https://github.com/Apicurio/apicurio-registry/blob/64a78a7ae61b080ec02c78d17ace6528ca57ce7b/app/src/main/java/io/apicurio/registry/ibmcompat/model/SchemaState.java#L72-L77

[antonmry]

This is something we were testing and it would help to have this feature. In our tests, only the ‘description’ was editable using the API and we would like to store information about the user who created the artifact. The field createdBy seems a great option but we didn’t find how to populate it using the standard API (we didn’t try with ccompat or ibmcompat).

This part could be also better documented at the API level to understand what fields aren’t editable. There are examples but not a complete list.

https://github.com/Apicurio/apicurio-registry/blob/6cf2db6064581ac15e60770c5d75f1f4226f75a9/common/src/main/resources/META-INF/openapi.json

[EricWittmann]

This has been fixed here: https://github.com/Apicurio/apicurio-registry/pull/777