Forum Discussion

tamlyn's avatar
tamlyn
New Contributor
5 years ago

Callbacks and readOnly/writeOnly

I have a question about how the readOnly and writeOnly properties relate to webhook requests.   The spec says of readOnly "This means that it MAY be sent as part of a response but SHOULD NOT be sen...
Swagger Core
Swagger UI
  • RonRatovsky's avatar
    RonRatovsky
    5 years ago

    Generally speaking, readOnly and writeOnly take effect based on the request initiator. So, readOnly means that the consumer can only receive it and writeOnly means the consumer can only write it.

     

    Callbacks (as opposed to pre-registered webhooks) are simply a way to describe delayed responses to requests. In that case, I'd expect the behavior to be the same as a regular synchronous request/response. So the callback call itself is a response rather than a request to the consumer.

     

    Please note that in the upcoming 3.1 release of OpenAPI, there are two changes. Webhooks are being introduced as a first-class citizen to the specification, and the above explanation is not necessarily true for that. However, the definition of readOnly/writeOnly changes slightly as well to conform with JSON Schema, so it's interesting to think what kind of an impact it may have on that.

tamlyn's avatar
tamlyn
New Contributor

Thanks. So you agree that the current implementation of Swagger UI which I described goes against your understanding of the spec? I'll open a ticket there. I opened a bug report.

 

I see what you mean about webhooks and callbacks being separate but given that most of the examples of using callbacks involve registering for a webhook, it would be quite confusing if webhooks defined using the webhooks key in OAS 3.1 behaved differently to other callbacks.

 

Do you think it's worth opening an issue at https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/ about this? I feel that the concept of "owning authority" in JSON Schema is quite vague and it would be helpful to make reference to it on the OAS spec.

RonRatovsky's avatar
RonRatovsky
Staff
5 years ago

We've had a discussion about it during one of our TSC calls. What we ended up deciding (and will be clarified in OAS 3.1) is that readOnly/writeOnly will follow the guidelines of the JSON Schema definition of those keywords. In JSON Schema, they are referred to as annotations - that means they are informative, and really up to the tooling to decide how to implement the support for them.