Definition of `Asset` type is wrong - failing content validation

Expected Behavior

Type definition of Asset should match the actual content that is returned from the API.

Actual Behavior

1. sys: Asset uses the general definition of sys, which requires a contentType entry. However, Asset does not include it. This is the main blocker for us (at Intercom).
2. title is declared as required - but it is not required by Contentful’s App/UI
3. description is declared as required - but it is not required by Contentful’s App/UI

Possible Solution

1. Fork the definition of sys so Asset could have it’s own sys definition which does not include contentType
2. Change definition of title and description to be optional

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create an Asset on Contentful (see that you can leave the title and description empty)
2. Export the asset’s JSON (either by API or by reloading the Contentful page and inspecting the network request in the browser)
3. See that the returned response does not contain a contentType node

Context

This blocks us from validating our content when deploying to production. Here at Intercom we “export” all the content (as JSON) through the Content Delivery API upon deployment - and validate everything with JSONSchema.

Up until now we were using “weak” validation that only verified the “fields” of each entry - but that allowed too many bad deployments (specifically - deployments with references to deleted entries). To generate the JSON schema we use typescript-json-schema. Most of the TypeScript types used for the schema are generated by our code - except for Entry and Asset that are coming from this lib.

Having this fixed would allow us to spot content issues during deployment, thus have much greater confidence in our deployments and less incidents in production.

Environment

Since this is tied directly to the code definitions I don’t believe my environment is relevant here. Omitting this to reduce noise.

Related Issues and PRs

https://github.com/contentful/contentful.js/issues/208 https://github.com/contentful/contentful.js/pull/258 https://github.com/contentful/contentful.js/pull/206

[marcolink]

Hey @alonre @alextiley @magnattic, we have completely rewritten the client in Typescript. This also includes better type definitions for Asset

You can check it out on npm under the beta-v10 tag (go to the “Versions” tab to find it). The migration guide and updated v10 README and can be found on the beta-v10 branch. All details on the new Typescript features can be found here.

[marcolink]

@magnattic

created a PR to also address this issue: https://github.com/contentful/contentful.js/pull/1240