Circular reference is considered an error

When you have a yaml model that reference itself, the validate function consider it an error, which is not. It is completely supported by tools like swagger-editor and swagger-codegen.

I’m using the latest release on npm (1.0.1).

To reproduce, use the petstore and add this in the definition part:

MenuItemDescription:
  type: string
  description: "List of all menu item descriptions"
  enum:
    - Choice1
    - Choice2
    - Choice3
MenuItem:
  type: object
  description: "Item in a menu"
  required:
    - description
    - childMenuItems
  properties:
    description:
      $ref: "#/definitions/MenuItemDescription"
    childMenuItems:
      type: array
      items:
        $ref: "#/definitions/MenuItem"

The error is as follow:

Swagger schema validation failed.
  Expected type object but found type string at #/definitions/$ref

JSON_OBJECT_VALIDATION_FAILED

Thanks!

[eugene-rockspoon]

It seems there isn’t solution but better error description, at least for swagger-cli bundle -r:

Circular $ref pointer found at /Users/name/go/src/github.com/repo/docs/myModel.yaml#/properties/elements/items

where elements/items:

myModel:
  properties:
    elements:
      items:
        $ref: "./myModel.yaml"
      type: array
      x-go-name: Elements

and swagger-cli validate gives swagger.yaml is valid

[msandasyntea]

Hello, I have found this thread today when I was searching for exactly this problem. I am getting exactly the same results as @eugene-rockspoon metioned. Funny fact I can validate my openApi.yaml spec locally (without error), but we are using it in gitlab CI and it fails. The version of swagger-cli is exactly the same in both enviroments (4.0.4). So this problem is still actual and I think it has to be resolved.