Supporting typed links

it would be useful to support general web-style type links, i.e. links that use RFC 8288 link relation types, as part of API description. this could be for something like service-doc, home, RFC 5005 style versioning links, and so forth. it simply would be helpful to reuse the established vocabulary for linking between web resources. in terms of where to put this, a good place might be either the openapi object or the info object. i’d propose to add a weblinks member which then would be a map of link relation types and target URIs.

[dret]

On 2020-01-20 16:01, Henry Andrews wrote:

@dret https://github.com/dret I was going to ask how that differs from the existing OAS 3.0 Link Objects, but then I looked and sure enough there is no place for RFC 8288 link relation types 😮

link objects are an abomination, and their name has so many implications that they cannot deliver on. they do extremely little, and yet their name seems to be sufficient for many to say “look, OpenAPI is supporting hypermedia now.”

Since the Link Objects are themselves entries in an object, I suppose the names in that object could be treated as RFC 8288 link relation types, but that is not made explicit anywhere.

maybe. i am really not interested in link objects, they are weird and limited and have nothing to do with hypermedia. but yes, they do confuse people and whatever might be happening with actual hypermedia support would have to address this confusion.

[dret]

this has been dormant for a long time but we just ran into another scenario where it would be nice if OpenAPI had a way how to cleanly use typed links that link from the OpenAPI description to related resources. it doesn’t feel like it would be a huge work item, in my mind it simply could be an addition to the info object. @darrelmiller, what do you think?