map attributes should allow arbitrary properties

[solaris007]

Describe the bug
When wanting to specify an attribute of type map, a full map-schema via the properties setting is required, effectively locking down what kind of maps can be stored for that attribute. There are use-cases however, where an attribute is desired to be a map, yet the contents of that map may vary. Similar to OpenAPI specs, we could envision to allow setting additionalProperties: true, in which case the value would be validated as a valid object but not enforce a schema within the object.

Currently this needs to be worked around like this with custom validation:

    data: {
      type: 'any',
      required: false,
      validate: (value) => !value || isNonEmptyObject(value),
    },

ElectroDB Version
3.0.1

[tywalch]

Hi @solaris007 👋

This sounds like a good job for the CustomAttributeType function. It allows you to have fine-grain typing for an attribute; here is a playground example.

A lot of people then pair this with a validation library like zod or jsonschema to accomplish the validation side of things 👍

[solaris007]

Hi @tywalch :) Thank you for your answer!

Certainly, the CustomAttributeType would be a great choice for more complex validations / types, but seems counter-intuitive / over-engineered for the simple case where we want to accept just any map?

[tywalch]

I suppose this was mainly to demonstrate that any type could be used, even something simple like Record<string, string> or { [key: string]: unknown }, which sounds like what you're trying to accomplish. Does this fall short of what you might be expecting?