| layout | title | permalink |
|---|---|---|
page |
JSON Schema |
/ |
The current version is draft-07! {: style="color:gray; font-size: 150%; text-align: center;"}
JSON Schema is a vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents.
- Describes your existing data format(s).
- Provides clear human- and machine- readable documentation.
- Validates data which is useful for:
- Automated testing.
- Ensuring quality of client submitted data.
- Make any JSON format a hypermedia format with no constraints on document structure
- Allows use of URI Templates with instance data
- Describe client data for use with links using JSON Schema.
- Recognizes collections and collection items.
We expect to publish a new round of drafts (Core, Validation, Hyper-Schema, Relative JSON Pointer) in early 2019, and are actively working on the last few PRs. While the drafts are currently expired, they are still under active development. This project is staffed by volunteers, and life occasionally disregards IETF expiration schedules.
The last two major PRs (for modular vocabularies and a standardized output format) are under review and have gotten several rounds of feedback. Once those are complete, there will be a four-week final review period during which we will take feedback on the overall flow and content before publication. Therefore, the likely publication date will be in January or Feburary 2019. We had hoped for December but the holiday season and other life events have prevented that.
This draft has taken more time than expected because it tackles deep, long-term issues that have long been a challenge for JSON Schema. This includes building in a formal extensibility mechanism so that we can more easily draw a line to finalize the contents of the Core and Validation specifications.
Progress on the next set of Internet-Drafts can be tracked on GitHub. The draft-08 milestone will track the evolving scope of the draft (although see issue #612 for a discussion of whether "draft-08" is the right name for this milestone).
The JSON Schema project intends to shepherd all four draft series to RFC status. Currently, we are continuing to improve our self-published Internet-Drafts. The next step will be to get the drafts adopted by an IETF Working Group. We are actively investigating how to accomplish this.
If you have experience with such things and would like to help, please contact us!
In the meantime, publication of Internet-Draft documents can be tracked through the IETF:
Internet-Drafts expire after six months, so our goal is to publish often enough to always have a set of unexpired drafts available. There may be brief gaps as we wrap up each draft and finalize the text.
The intention, particularly for vocabularies such as validation which have been widely implemented, is to remain as compatible as possible from draft to draft. However, these are still drafts, and given a clear enough need validated with the user community, major changes can occur.
The JSON document being validated or described we call the instance, and the document containing the description is called the schema.
The most basic schema is a blank JSON object, which constrains nothing, allows anything, and describes nothing:
{}You can apply constraints on an instance by adding validation keywords to the schema. For example, the "type" keyword can be used to restrict an instance to an object, array, string, number, boolean, or null:
{ "type": "string" }JSON Schema is hypermedia ready, and ideal for annotating your existing JSON-based HTTP API. JSON Schema documents are identified by URIs, which can be used in HTTP Link headers, and inside JSON Schema documents to allow recursive definitions.
Interested? Check out:
- The specification
- Learning resources
- the growing list of JSON (Hyper-)Schema software
We encourage updating to the latest specification, as described by the draft-07 meta-schemas.
Questions? Feeling helpful? Get involved on: