Type and format

AI-generated Key Takeaways

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• The type and format properties are used to determine the data type of properties in JSON requests and responses.

• The type property indicates the JSON data type, while the format property provides additional, more specific type information.

• Some data types that cannot be directly represented in JSON, like 64-bit integers, are represented as a string type with a specific format value.

• The Google APIs Discovery Service supports a list of type and format values, including those defined in the JSON Schema spec and some Google-specific ones.

The type and format properties on parameters and schemas can be used to determine the data type of the property. The type property indicates the type of the property when its sent in JSON requests and responses (JSON supports a small set of data types, see json.org for details). The format property provides additional information about the underlying type. Properties will always have a type property, but some may also have a format property.

For example, a 64-bit integer cannot be represented in JSON (since JavaScript and JSON support integers up to 2^53). Therefore, a 64-bit integer must be represented as a string in JSON requests/responses. So the type property will be set to "string", but the format property will be set to "int64" to indicate that it is a 64-bit integer.

The JSON Schema spec already defines a set of common values for the format property. The Google APIs Discovery Service supports some of these values, and defines others as well. The full list of type and format values supported by Google APIs Discovery Service is summarized below.

string	uint64	A 64-bit unsigned integer. It has a minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of (2^64)-1 (inclusive).