'extra' field in 'registered_meta' 'summary' object is serialized as an object and as an array.

Summary

The registered_meta field carries an object named summary. The summary object carries a field named extra. I have two registrations; each registration serializes the extra field differently.

Both registrations would have been made by the UI (not the API). Note that 5nua2 was registered some time after tgzhk (August vs March), so maybe some change in the underlying code base is responsible for this?

Steps

1. Look at registered_meta for tgzhk (note: using version 2.2 of the API)- extra is serialized as an empty object:

"registered_meta": {
                "summary": {
                    "value": "Test registration.",
                    "comments": [],
                    "extra": {}
                }
            }

1. Look at registered_meta for 5nua2 (note: using version 2.2 of the API)- extra is serialized as an empty array:

"registered_meta": {
                "summary": {
                    "value": "test",
                    "comments": [],
                    "extra": []
                }
            }

Expected

I would expect the type of the extra field to be consistent. That is, for all registered_meta instances, all extra fields would either be an array or an object, but not both.

This is all the more curious because the values for extra in this case are empty!

Actual

In actuality, it appears that the extra, at least when part of registered_meta, can be arbitrarily an object or an array, which proves problematic when deserializing the JSON to Java objects.

[felliott]

Hey @emetsger, @msuhovec,

We’ve got a ticket for this issue. It’ll probably in the second post-Django release.

Cheers, @felliott

[brianjgeiger]

Also, the field should always be a list. If there’s anything in the list, currently that’s going to be file metadata.