Internet-Draft CDDL feature freezer April 2021
Bormann Expires 16 October 2021 [Page]
Workgroup:
Network Working Group
Internet-Draft:
draft-bormann-cbor-cddl-freezer-06
Published:
Intended Status:
Informational
Expires:
Author:
C. Bormann
Universität Bremen TZI

A feature freezer for the Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL)

Abstract

In defining the Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL), some features have turned up that would be nice to have. In the interest of completing this specification in a timely manner, the present document was started to collect nice-to-have features that did not make it into the first RFC for CDDL, RFC 8610.

It is now time to discuss thawing some of the concepts discussed here. A number of additional proposals have been added.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on 16 October 2021.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

In defining the Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL), some features have turned up that would be nice to have. In the interest of completing this specification in a timely manner, the present document was started to collect nice-to-have features that did not make it into the first RFC for CDDL [RFC8610].

It is now time to discuss thawing some of the concepts discussed here. A number of additional proposals have been added.

There is always a danger for a document like this to become a shopping list; the intention is to develop this document further based on real-world experience with the first CDDL standard.

2. Base language features

2.1. Cuts

Section 3.5.4 of [RFC8610] alludes to a new language feature, cuts, and defines it in a fashion that is rather focused on a single application in the context of maps and generating better diagnostic information about them.

The present document is expected to grow a more complete definition of cuts, with the expectation that it will be upwards-compatible to the existing one in [RFC8610], before this possibly becomes a mainline language feature in a future version of CDDL.

3. Literal syntax

3.1. Tag-oriented Literals

Some CBOR tags often would be most natural to use in a CDDL spec with a literal syntax that is tailored to their semantics instead of their serialization in CBOR. There is currently no way to add such syntaxes, no defined extension point either.

The text form of CoRAL [I-D.ietf-core-coral] defines literals of the form

  • dt'2019-07-21T19:53Z'

for datetime items. (Similar advances should then probably be made in diagnostic notation.)

3.2. Regular Expression Literals

Regular expressions currently are notated as strings in CDDL, with all the string escaping rules applied once. It might be convenient to have a more conventional literal format for regular expressions, possibly also providing a place to add modifiers such as /i. This might also imply text .regexp ..., which with the proposal in Section 4.1 then raises the question of how to indicate the regular expression flavor.

3.3. Clarifications

A number of errata reports have been made around some details of text string and byte string literal syntax: [Err6527] and [Err6543]. These need to be addressed by re-examining the details of these literal syntaxes. Also, [Err6526] needs to be applied.

3.3.1. Err6527

The ABNF used in [RFC8610] for the content of text string literals is rather permissive:

text = %x22 *SCHAR %x22
SCHAR = %x20-21 / %x23-5B / %x5D-7E / %x80-10FFFD / SESC
SESC = "\" (%x20-7E / %x80-10FFFD)

This allows almost any non-C0 character to be escaped by a backslash, but critically misses out on the \uXXXX and \uHHHH\uLLLL forms that JSON allows to specify characters in hex. Both can be solved by updating the SESC production to:

SESC = "\" ( %x22 / %x2F / %x5C / %x62 / %x66 / %x6E / %x72 / %x74 /
             (%x75 hexchar) )
hexchar = non-surrogate / (high-surrogate "\" %x75 low-surrogate)
non-surrogate = ((DIGIT / "A"/"B"/"C" / "E"/"F") 3HEXDIG) /
               ("D" %x30-37 2HEXDIG )
high-surrogate = "D" ("8"/"9"/"A"/"B") 2HEXDIG
low-surrogate = "D" ("C"/"D"/"E"/"F") 2HEXDIG

Now that SESC is more restrictively formulated, this also requires an update to the BCHAR production used in the ABNF syntax for byte string literals:

bytes = [bsqual] %x27 *BCHAR %x27
BCHAR = %x20-26 / %x28-5B / %x5D-10FFFD / SESC / CRLF
bsqual = "h" / "b64"

The updated version explicit allows \', which is no longer allowed in the updated SESC:

BCHAR = %x20-26 / %x28-5B / %x5D-10FFFD / SESC / "\'" / CRLF

3.3.2. Err6543

The ABNF used in [RFC8610] for the content of byte string literals lumps together byte strings notated as text with byte strings notated in base16 (hex) or base64 (but see also updated BCHAR production above):

bytes = [bsqual] %x27 *BCHAR %x27
BCHAR = %x20-26 / %x28-5B / %x5D-10FFFD / SESC / CRLF

Errata report 6543 proposes to handle the two cases in separate productions (where, with an updated SESC, BCHAR obviously needs to be updated as above):

bytes = %x27 *BCHAR %x27
      / bsqual %x27 *QCHAR %x27
BCHAR = %x20-26 / %x28-5B / %x5D-10FFFD / SESC / CRLF
QCHAR = DIGIT / ALPHA / "+" / "/" / "-" / "_" / "=" / WS

This potentially causes a subtle change, which is hidden in the WS production:

WS = SP / NL
SP = %x20
NL = COMMENT / CRLF
COMMENT = ";" *PCHAR CRLF
PCHAR = %x20-7E / %x80-10FFFD
CRLF = %x0A / %x0D.0A

This allows any non-C0 character in a comment, so this fragment becomes possible:

foo = h'
   43424F52 ; 'CBOR'
   0A       ; LF, but don't use CR!
'

The current text is not unambiguously saying whether the three apostrophes need to be escaped with a \ or not, as in:

foo = h'
   43424F52 ; \'CBOR\'
   0A       ; LF, but don\'t use CR!
'

... which would be supported by the existing ABNF in [RFC8610].

4. Controls

Controls are the main extension point of the CDDL language. It is relatively painless to add controls to CDDL. Several candidates have been identified that aren't quite ready for adoption, of which one shall be listed here.

4.1. Control operator .pcre

There are many variants of regular expression languages. Section 3.8.3 of [RFC8610] defines the .regexp control, which is based on XSD [XSD2] regular expressions. As discussed in that section, the most desirable form of regular expressions in many cases is the family called "Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions" ([PCRE]); however, no formally stable definition of PCRE is available at this time for normatively referencing it from an RFC.

The present document defines the control operator .pcre, which is similar to .regexp, but uses PCRE2 regular expressions. More specifically, a .pcre control indicates that the text string given as a target needs to match the PCRE regular expression given as a value in the control type, where that regular expression is anchored on both sides. (If anchoring is not desired for a side, .* needs to be inserted there.)

Similarly, .es2018re could be defined for ECMAscript 2018 regular expressions with anchors added.

4.2. Endianness in .bits

How useful would it be to have another variant of .bits that counts bits like in RFC box notation? (Or at least per-byte? 32-bit words don't always perfectly mesh with byte strings.)

4.3. .bitfield control

Provide a way to specify bitfields in byte strings and uints to a higher level of detail than is possible with .bits. Strawman:

Field = uint .bitfield Fieldbits

Fieldbits = [
  flag1: [1, bool],
  val: [4, Vals],
  flag2: [1, bool],
]

Vals = &(A: 0, B: 1, C: 2, D: 3)

Note that the group within the controlling array can have choices, enabling the whole power of a context-free grammar (but not much more).

5. Co-occurrence Constraints

While there are no co-occurrence constraints in CDDL, many actual use cases can be addressed by using the fact that a group is a grammar:

postal = {
  ( street: text,
    housenumber: text) //
  ( pobox: text .regexp "[0-9]+" )
}

However, constraints that are not just structural/tree-based but are predicates combining parts of the structure cannot be expressed:

session = {
  timeout: uint,
}

other-session = {
  timeout: uint  .lt [somehow refer to session.timeout],
}

As a minimum, this requires the ability to reach over to other parts of the tree in a control. Compare JSON Pointer [RFC6901] and JSON Relative Pointer [I-D.handrews-relative-json-pointer]. Stefan Goessner's jsonpath is a JSON variant of XPath that has not been formally standardized [jsonpath].

More generally, something akin to what Schematron is to Relax-NG may be needed.

6. Module superstructure

CDDL rules could be packaged as modules and referenced from other modules. There could be some control of namespace pollution, as well as unambiguous referencing ("versioning").

This is probably best achieved by a pragma-like syntax which could be carried in CDDL comments, leaving each module to be valid CDDL (if missing some rule definitions to be imported).

6.1. Namespacing

A convention for mapping CDDL-internal names to external ones could be developed, possibly steered by some pragma-like constructs. External names would likely be URI-based, with some conventions as they are used in RDF or Curies. Internal names might look similar to XML QNames. Note that the identifier character set for CDDL deliberately includes $ and @, which could be used in such a convention.

7. Alternative Representations

For CDDL, alternative representations e.g. in JSON (and thus in YAML) could be defined, similar to the way YANG defines an XML-based serialization called YIN in Section 11 of [RFC6020]. One proposal for such a syntax is provided by the cddlc tool [cddlc]; this could be written up and agreed upon.

cddlj = ["cddl", +rule]
rule = ["=" / "/=" / "//=", namep, type]
namep = ["name", id] / ["gen", id, +id]
id = text .regexp "[A-Za-z@_$](([-.])*[A-Za-z0-9@_$])*"
op = ".." / "..." /
  text .regexp "\\.[A-Za-z@_$](([-.])*[A-Za-z0-9@_$])*"
namea = ["name", id] / ["gen", id, +type]
type = value / namea / ["op", op, type, type] /
  ["map", group] / ["ary", group] / ["tcho", 2*type] /
  ["unwrap", namea] / ["enum", group / namea] /
  ["prim", ?(0..7, ?uint)]
group = ["mem", null/type, type] /
  ["rep", uint, uint/false, group] /
  ["seq", 2*group] / ["gcho", 2*group]
value = ["number"/"text"/"bytes", text]

8. IANA Considerations

This document makes no requests of IANA.

9. Security considerations

The security considerations of [RFC8610] apply.

10. References

10.1. Normative References

[RFC8610]
Birkholz, H., Vigano, C., and C. Bormann, "Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL): A Notational Convention to Express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and JSON Data Structures", RFC 8610, DOI 10.17487/RFC8610, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8610>.

10.2. Informative References

[cddlc]
"CDDL conversion utilities", n.d., <https://github.com/cabo/cddlc>.
[Err6526]
"Errata Report 6526", RFC 8610, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid6526>.
[Err6527]
"Errata Report 6527", RFC 8610, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid6527>.
[Err6543]
"Errata Report 6543", RFC 8610, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid6543>.
[I-D.handrews-relative-json-pointer]
Luff, G. and H. Andrews, "Relative JSON Pointers", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-handrews-relative-json-pointer-02, , <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-handrews-relative-json-pointer-02.txt>.
[I-D.ietf-core-coral]
Hartke, K., "The Constrained RESTful Application Language (CoRAL)", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-core-coral-03, , <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-core-coral-03.txt>.
[jsonpath]
"jsonpath online evaluator", n.d., <https://jsonpath.com>.
[PCRE]
"Perl-compatible Regular Expressions (revised API: PCRE2)", n.d., <http://pcre.org/current/doc/html/>.
[RFC6020]
Bjorklund, M., Ed., "YANG - A Data Modeling Language for the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF)", RFC 6020, DOI 10.17487/RFC6020, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6020>.
[RFC6901]
Bryan, P., Ed., Zyp, K., and M. Nottingham, Ed., "JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Pointer", RFC 6901, DOI 10.17487/RFC6901, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6901>.
[XSD2]
Biron, P. and A. Malhotra, "XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation REC-xmlschema-2-20041028, , <https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-2-20041028>.

Acknowledgements

Many people have asked for CDDL to be completed, soon. These are usually also the people who have brought up observations that led to the proposals discussed here. Sean Leonard has campaigned for a regexp literal syntax.

Author's Address

Carsten Bormann
Universität Bremen TZI
Postfach 330440
D-28359 Bremen
Germany