Semantic Validation of Mid & Low Telescope

Semantic Validation

It referred to as a semantic error. It is generally encountered at run time. It occurs when a statement is syntactically valid but semantically invalid. This type of error is tough to catch. To catch this type of error we have created a framework named ‘Semantic Validation’ into ‘ska_ost_osd’ under ‘telvalidation’ package and integrated the same into ‘CDM’.

To do the Semantic Validation of received JSON for any other component through CDM there are some steps which user needs to follow.

• Step 1

  Add latest CDM version into ‘pyproject.toml’ file.

• Step 2

  Import semantic_validate_schema function from ‘ska-tmc-cdm’ jsonschema classes

  from ska_tmc_cdm.jsonschema.json_schema.JsonSchema import semantic_validate_schema
  

• Step 3

  If developer wants to go with semantic validation then he needs to call ‘semantic_validate_schema’ function which is present under jsonschema class of ‘ska_tmc_cdm’ and provide appropriate parameters to the function. There are two parameters for this function which are ‘instance’ & ‘uri’. ‘instance’ is a dictionary which user wants to validate and ‘uri’ is a string containing interface of schema. If json is against AA0.5 complaince then it will throw the ‘SchematicValidationError’ exception.

  try:
     return semantic_validate_schema(
        instance: dict,
        uri: str
     )
  
  except SchematicValidationError as exc:
        raise exc
  

  Import ‘SchematicValidationError’ from ‘ska_ost_osd’ which contains all the customized error messages in string format.

  from ska_ost_osd.telvalidation.common.error_handling import SchematicValidationError
  

Using VALIDATION_STRICTNESS environment variable

The strictness parameter passed to CODEC.loads() or CODEC.dumps() is the primary way to configure what validation logic is applied to JSON input and output from the CDM library.

This takes an integer value, but the levels are not strictly defined. At time of writing,

• strictness=0 will not run any external validation, only the Pydantic model validation in the CDM. This is the same as setting validation=False

• strictness=1 will apply telmodel schema validation, but raise warnings rather than exceptions, it will not apply OSD semantic validation.

• strictness=2 will run telmodel schema validation that raises exceptions, and also apply the OSD semantic validations.

In some situations, a user may want to control whether semantic validation should be performed in the program. By using an environment variable, the behavior can be easily changed without access to the place where the CDM is being called, which is useful for different deployment environments or testing scenarios.

For example, if a user wants to disable the OSD semantic validation, they can use the VALIDATION_STRICTNESS environment variable to set a value less than 2.

export VALIDATION_STRICTNESS=1