Validating with named schemas

After the change from using a global schema map to passing around named schemas It seems to me that validating a message against a complex schema with nested named schemas is not possible (or I have just missed it). Previously I would use fastavro.validation.validate to validate the a message against a schema. However that fails without the global variable. However using the private API function fastavro.validation._validate passing in the datum, schema and my named schemas works.

I don’t feel comfortable to simply use the private API, although it works at the moment. Would you consider introducing a function to the public API that wraps the private function, or add named_schemas as a keyword only argument to fastavro.validation.validate?

[scottbelden]

I went ahead and merged this. It seems like it’s in a useable state and I’d rather go ahead and get it out there for people to use if they’d like to.

[scottbelden]

That’s a good observation, but I think that’s okay. The two ways around that that I can think of would be the following:

1. Have some global state to know previous schemas that have been loaded. This is what used to be done with SCHEMA_DEFS and was removed because it would cause non-obvious errors
2. Allow the user to pass the named_schemas structure (which is basically the local version of SCHEMA_DEFS) into some of these functions since that structure has the knowledge of previous parsed schemas. At the moment though I’m not a fan of users having to really interact with that structure as it feels like it would make for an ugly and unintuitive API.

So for the moment I think being more explicit about the schema dependencies is okay.