[ckan-dev] What is the current state and future of the extras field?

Fri Nov 8 15:42:11 UTC 2013

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:03 AM, Konrad Reiche <konrad.reiche at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Ian,
>
> thanks for responding. So would you recommend staying with nested fields
> on extras?
>
> The problem arises for metadata consumer. If they use the API to
> retrieve the packages as JSONs and parse them into a language specific
> data structure, then they need to deal with the recursive JSON parsing
> on the extra field values themselves.

I think I understand now.

Yes, CKAN *without* a custom schema is unnecessarily verbose and
difficult about the way it presents extra fields on datasets. I would
like to see that changed. One flat 'extras' object with just the user
provided keys and values would be better.

Ian