@@ -472,8 +472,8 @@ All branches of the union must be complex types, and the top-level
members of the union dictionary on the wire will be combination of
members from both the base type and the appropriate branch type (when
merging two dictionaries, there must be no keys in common). The
-'discriminator' member must be the name of a non-optional enum-typed
-member of the base struct.
+'discriminator' member must be the name of an enum-typed member of the
+base struct.
The following example enhances the above simple union example by
adding an optional common member 'read-only', renaming the
@@ -502,6 +502,23 @@ the enum). In the resulting generated C data types, a flat union is
represented as a struct with the base members included directly, and
then a union of structures for each branch of the struct.
+If the discriminator points to an optional member of the base struct,
+its default value must be specified as a 'default-variant'. In the
+following example, the above BlockDriver struct is changed so it
+defaults to the 'file' driver if that field is omitted on the wire:
+
+ { 'union': 'BlockdevOptions',
+ 'base': { '*driver': 'BlockdevDriver', '*read-only': 'bool' },
+ 'discriminator': 'driver',
+ 'default-variant': 'file',
+ 'data': { 'file': 'BlockdevOptionsFile',
+ 'qcow2': 'BlockdevOptionsQcow2' } }
+
+Now the 'file' JSON object can be abbreviated to:
+
+ { "read-only": "true",
+ "filename": "/some/place/my-image" }
+
A simple union can always be re-written as a flat union where the base
class has a single member named 'type', and where each branch of the
union has a struct with a single member named 'data'. That is,
Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com> --- docs/devel/qapi-code-gen.txt | 21 +++++++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)