NETMOD Working Group L. Lhotka
Internet-Draft CZ.NIC
Intended status: Standards Track October 13, 2014
Expires: April 16, 2015
JSON Encoding of Data Modeled with YANG
draft-ietf-netmod-yang-json-01
Abstract
This document defines encoding rules for representing configuration,
state data, RPC input and output parameters, and notifications
defined using YANG as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) text.
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 http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 16, 2015.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology and Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Validation of JSON-encoded
Instance Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Names and Namespaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Encoding of YANG Data Node Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.1. The "leaf" Data Node . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.2. The "container" Data Node . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.3. The "leaf-list" Data Node . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.4. The "list" Data Node . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.5. The "anyxml" Data Node . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. The Mapping of YANG Datatypes to JSON Values . . . . . . . . 8
6.1. Numeric Datatypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2. The "string" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.3. The "boolean" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.4. The "enumeration" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.5. The "bits" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.6. The "binary" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.7. The "leafref" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.8. The "identityref" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.9. The "empty" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.10. The "union" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6.11. The "instance-identifier" Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. I-JSON Compliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
9. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Appendix A. A Complete Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Appendix B. Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
B.1. Changes Between Revisions -00 and -01 . . . . . . . . . . 16
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1. Introduction
The NETCONF protocol [RFC6241] uses XML [W3C.REC-xml-20081126] for
encoding data in its Content Layer. Other management protocols might
want to use other encodings while still benefiting from using YANG
[RFC6020] as the data modeling language.
For example, the RESTCONF protocol [I-D.ietf-netconf-restconf]
supports two encodings: XML (media type "application/yang.data+xml")
and JSON (media type "application/yang.data+json).
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
The specification of the YANG data modelling language [RFC6020]
defines only XML encoding for data instances, i.e. contents of
configuration datastores, state data, RFC input and output
parameters, and event notifications. The aim of this document is to
define rules for encoding the same data as JavaScript Object Notation
(JSON) text [RFC7159].
In order to achieve maximum interoperability while allowing
implementations to use a variety of available JSON parsers, the JSON
encoding rules follow, as much as possible, the constraints of the
I-JSON restricted profile [I-D.ietf-json-i-json]. Section Section 7
discusses I-JSON conformance in more detail.
2. Terminology and Notation
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
The following terms are defined in [RFC6020]:
o anyxml
o augment
o container
o data node
o identity
o instance identifier
o leaf
o leaf-list
o list
o module
o submodule
3. Validation of JSON-encoded Instance Data
Instance data validation as defined in [RFC6020] is only applicable
to XML-encoded data. For one, semantic constraints in "must"
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
statements are expressed using XPath 1.0 [W3C.REC-xpath-19991116],
which can be properly interpreted only in the XML context.
This document along with the corresponding "XML Mapping Rules"
sections from [RFC6020] also define an implicit schema-driven mapping
of JSON-encoded instances to XML-encoded instances (and vice versa).
This mapping is mostly straightforward. In cases where doubts could
arise, this document gives explicit instructions for mapping JSON-
encoded instances to XML.
In order to validate a JSON instance document, it MUST first be
mapped, at least conceptually, to the corresponding XML instance
document. By definition, the JSON document is then valid if and only
if the XML document is valid according to the rules stated in
[RFC6020].
4. Names and Namespaces
Instances of YANG data nodes (leafs, containers, leaf-lists, lists
and anyxml nodes) are always encoded as members of a JSON object,
i.e., as name/value pairs. This section defines how the name part is
formed, and the following sections deal with the value part.
Except in the cases specified below, the member name is identical to
the identifier of the corresponding YANG data node. Every such name
belongs to a namespace which is associated with the YANG module where
the corresponding data node is defined. If the data node is defined
in a submodule, then the namespace is determined by the main module
to which the submodule belongs.
If the namespace of a member name has to be explicitly specified, the
module name SHALL be used as a prefix to the (local) member name.
Both parts of the member name SHALL be separated with a colon
character (":"). In other words, the namespace-qualified name will
have the following form:
<module name>:<local name>
Figure 1: Encoding a namespace identifier with a local name.
Names with namespace identifiers in the form shown in Figure 1 MUST
be used for all top-level YANG data nodes, and also for all nodes
whose parent node belongs to a different namespace. Otherwise, names
with namespace identifiers MUST NOT be used.
For example, consider the following YANG module:
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
module foomod {
namespace "http://example.com/foomod";
prefix "foo";
container top {
leaf foo {
type uint8;
}
}
}
If the data model consists only of this module, then the following is
a valid JSON-encoded configuration:
{
"foomod:top": {
"foo": 54
}
}
Note that the top-level container instance contains the namespace
identifier (module name) but the "foo" leaf doesn't because it is
defined in the same module as its parent container.
Now, assume the container "top" is augmented from another module,
"barmod":
module barmod {
namespace "http://example.com/barmod";
prefix "bar";
import foomod {
prefix "foo";
}
augment "/foo:top" {
leaf bar {
type boolean;
}
}
}
A valid JSON-encoded configuration containing both leafs may then
look like this:
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
{
"foomod:top": {
"foo": 54,
"barmod:bar": true
}
}
The name of the "bar" leaf must be prefixed with the namespace
identifier because its parent is defined in a different module, hence
it belongs to another namespace.
Explicit namespace identifiers are sometimes needed when encoding
values of the "identityref" and "instances-identifier" types. The
same form as shown in Figure 1 is then used as well. See Sections
6.8 and 6.11 for details.
5. Encoding of YANG Data Node Instances
Every complete JSON instance document, such as a configuration
datastore content, is an object. Its members are instances of all
top-level data nodes defined by the YANG data model.
Character encoding MUST be UTF-8.
Any data node instance is encoded as a name/value pair where the name
is formed from the data node identifier using the rules of Section 4.
The value depends on the category of the data node as explained in
the following subsections.
5.1. The "leaf" Data Node
A leaf instance is encoded as a name/value pair where the value can
be a string, number, literal 'true' or 'false' or the special array
'[null]', depending on the type of the leaf (see Section 6 for the
type encoding rules).
Example: For the leaf node definition
leaf foo {
type uint8;
}
the following is a valid JSON-encoded instance:
"foo": 123
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
5.2. The "container" Data Node
An container instance is encoded as a name/object pair. The
container's child data nodes are encoded as members of the object.
Example: For the container definition
container bar {
leaf foo {
type uint8;
}
}
the following is a valid instance:
"bar": {
"foo": 123
}
5.3. The "leaf-list" Data Node
A leaf-list is encoded as a name/array pair, and the array elements
are values whose type depends on the datatype of the leaf-list (see
Section 6).
Example: For the leaf-list definition
leaf-list foo {
type uint8;
}
the following is a valid instance:
"foo": [123, 0]
5.4. The "list" Data Node
A list instance is encoded as a name/array pair, and the array
elements are JSON objects.
Unlike the XML encoding, where list keys are required to precede any
other siblings, and to appear in the order specified by the data
model, the order of members within a JSON-encoded list entry is
arbitrary because JSON objects are fundamentally unordered
collections of members.
Example: For the list definition
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
list bar {
key foo;
leaf foo {
type uint8;
}
leaf baz {
type string;
}
}
the following is a valid instance:
"bar": [
{
"foo": 123,
"baz": "zig"
},
{
"baz": "zag",
"foo": 0
}
]
5.5. The "anyxml" Data Node
An anyxml instance is translated to a name/value pair. The value can
be of any valid JSON type, i.e. an object, array, number, string or
any of the literals 'true', 'false' and 'null'.
This document defines no mapping between the contents of JSON- and
XML-encoded anyxml instances. It is not necessary because anyxml
contents are not subject to YANG-based validation (see sec. 7.10 in
[RFC6020]).
Example: For the anyxml definition
anyxml bar;
the following is a valid instance:
"bar": [true, null, true]
6. The Mapping of YANG Datatypes to JSON Values
The type of the JSON value in an instance of the leaf or leaf-list
data node depends on the datatype of that data node as specified in
the following subsections.
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
6.1. Numeric Datatypes
A value of the "int8", "int16", "int32", "uint8", "uint16" is
represented as a JSON number.
A value of the "int64", "uint64" or "decimal64" type is encoded as a
JSON string whose contents is the lexical representation of that
numeric value as specified in sections 9.2.1 and 9.3.1 of [RFC6020].
For example, if the type of the leaf "foo" in Section 5.1 was
"unit64" instead of "uint8", the instance would have to be encoded as
"foo": "123"
The special handling of 64-bit numbers follows from I-JSON
recommendation to encode numbers exceeding the IEEE 754-2000 double
precision range as strings, see sec. 2.2 in [I-D.ietf-json-i-json].
6.2. The "string" Type
A "string" value encoded as a JSON string, subject to JSON encoding
rules.
6.3. The "boolean" Type
A "boolean" value is mapped to the corresponding JSON literal name
'true' or 'false'.
6.4. The "enumeration" Type
An "enumeration" value is mapped in the same way as a string except
that the permitted values are defined by "enum" statements in YANG.
See sec. 9.6 in [RFC6020].
6.5. The "bits" Type
A "bits" value is mapped to a JSON string identical to the lexical
representation of this value in XML, i.e., space-separated names
representing the individual bit values that are set. See sec. 9.7 in
[RFC6020].
6.6. The "binary" Type
A "binary" value is mapped to a JSON string identical to the lexical
representation of this value in XML, i.e., base64-encoded binary
data. See sec. 9.8 in [RFC6020].
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
6.7. The "leafref" Type
A "leafref" value is mapped according to the same rules as the type
of the leaf being referred to.
6.8. The "identityref" Type
An "identityref" value is mapped to a string representing the name of
an identity. Its namespace MUST be expressed as shown in Figure 1 if
it is different from the namespace of the leaf node containing the
identityref value, and MAY be expressed otherwise.
For example, consider the following schematic module:
module exmod {
...
import ietf-interfaces {
prefix if;
}
import iana-if-type {
prefix ianaift;
}
...
leaf type {
type identityref {
base "if:interface-type";
}
}
}
A valid instance of the "type" leaf is then encoded as follows:
"type": "iana-if-type:ethernetCsmacd"
The namespace identifier "iana-if-type" must be present in this case
because the "ethernetCsmacd" identity is not defined in the same
module as the "type" leaf.
6.9. The "empty" Type
An "empty" value is mapped to '[null]', i.e., an array with the
'null' literal being its only element.
This encoding was chosen instead of using simply 'null' in order to
facilitate the use of empty leafs in common programming languages.
When used in a boolean context, the '[null]' value, unlike 'null',
evaluates to true.
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
Example: For the leaf definition
leaf foo {
type empty;
}
a valid instance is
"foo": [null]
6.10. The "union" Type
A value of the "union" type is encoded as the value of any of the
member types.
Unlike XML, JSON conveys part of the type information already in the
encoding. When validating a value of the "union" type, this
information MUST also be taken into account.
For example, consider the following YANG definition:
leaf bar {
type union {
type uint16;
type string;
}
}
In RESTCONF [I-D.ietf-netconf-restconf], it is fully acceptable to
set the value of "bar" in the following way when using the
"application/yang.data+xml" media type:
<bar>13.5</bar>
because the value may be interpreted as a string, i.e., the second
member type of the union. When using the "application/
yang.data+json" media type, however, this is an error:
"bar": 13.5
In this case, the JSON encoding indicates the value is supposed to be
a number rather than string.
6.11. The "instance-identifier" Type
An "instance-identifier" value is encoded as a string that is
analogical to the lexical representation in XML encoding, see
sec. 9.13.3 in [RFC6020]. The only difference is that XML namespace
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
prefixes used for qualifying node names in the instance-identifier
value are replaced by the corresponding module names according to the
rules of Section 4.
Conversely, when translating such a value from JSON to XML, the
namespace identifier (YANG module name) in each component of the
instance-identifier MUST be replaced by the XML namespace prefix that
is associated with the namespace URI reference of the module.
For example, assume "ex" is the prefix associated with the namespace
URI that is defined in the "example" module. Then the XML-encoded
instance-identifier
/ex:system/ex:user[ex:name='fred']
corresponds to the following JSON-encoded instance-identifier:
/example:system/example:user[example:name='fred']
7. I-JSON Compliance
I-JSON [I-D.ietf-json-i-json] is a restricted profile of JSON that
guarantees maximum interoperability for protocols that use JSON in
their messages, no matter what JSON encoders/decoders are used in
protocol implementations. The encoding defined in this document
therefore observes the I-JSON requirements and recommendations as
closely as possible.
In particular, the following properties are guaranteed:
o Character encoding is UTF-8.
o Member names within the same JSON object are always unique.
o The order of JSON object members is never relied upon.
o Numbers of any type supported by YANG can be exchanged reliably.
See Section 6.1 for details.
The only two cases where a JSON instance document encoded according
to this document may deviate from I-JSON were dictated by the need to
be able to encode the same instance data in both JSON and XML. These
two exceptions are:
o Leaf values encoded as strings may contain code points identifying
Noncharacters that belong to the XML character set (see sec. 2.2
in [W3C.REC-xml-20081126]).
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 12]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
o Values of the "binary" type are encoded with the base64 encoding
scheme (see sec. 9.8.2 in [RFC6020]) whereas I-JSON recommends
base64url instead. However, the use of base64 should not cause
any interoperability problems because these values never appear in
an URL.
8. Security Considerations
This document defines an alternative encoding for data modeled in the
YANG data modeling language. As such, it doesn't contribute any new
security issues beyond those discussed in sec. 15 of [RFC6020].
JSON is rather different from XML, and JSON parsers may thus suffer
from other types of vulnerabilities than their XML counterparts. To
minimize these security risks, it is important that client and server
software supporting JSON encoding behaves as required in sec. 3 of
[I-D.ietf-json-i-json]. That is, any received JSON data that violate
any of I-JSON strict constraints MUST NOT be trusted nor acted upon.
Violations due to the presence of Unicode Noncharacters in the data
exceptions (see Section 7) SHOULD be carefully examined.
9. Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Andy Bierman, Martin Bjorklund, Juergen
Schoenwaelder and Phil Shafer for their helpful comments and
suggestions.
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[I-D.ietf-json-i-json]
Bray, T., "The I-JSON Message Format", draft-ietf-json-
i-json-03 (work in progress), August 2014.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC6020] Bjorklund, M., "YANG - A Data Modeling Language for the
Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF)", RFC 6020,
October 2010.
[RFC6241] Enns, R., Bjorklund, M., Schoenwaelder, J., and A.
Bierman, "Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF)", RFC
6241, June 2011.
[RFC7159] Bray, T., "The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data
Interchange Format", RFC 7159, March 2014.
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 13]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
[W3C.REC-xml-20081126]
Bray, T., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, M., Maler, E., and
F. Yergeau, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth
Edition)", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation REC-
xml-20081126, November 2008,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126>.
10.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-netconf-restconf]
Bierman, A., Bjorklund, M., and K. Watsen, "RESTCONF
Protocol", draft-ietf-netconf-restconf-02 (work in
progress), October 2014.
[RFC7223] Bjorklund, M., "A YANG Data Model for Interface
Management", RFC 7223, May 2014.
[W3C.REC-xpath-19991116]
Clark, J. and S. DeRose, "XML Path Language (XPath)
Version 1.0", World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation
REC-xpath-19991116, November 1999,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xpath-19991116>.
Appendix A. A Complete Example
The JSON document shown below represents the same data as the reply
to the NETCONF <get> request appearing in Appendix D of [RFC7223].
The data model is a combination of two YANG modules: "ietf-
interfaces" and "ex-vlan" (the latter is an example module from
Appendix C of [RFC7223]). The "if-mib" feature defined in the "ietf-
interfaces" module is considered to be active.
{
"ietf-interfaces:interfaces": {
"interface": [
{
"name": "eth0",
"type": "iana-if-type:ethernetCsmacd",
"enabled": false
},
{
"name": "eth1",
"type": "iana-if-type:ethernetCsmacd",
"enabled": true,
"ex-vlan:vlan-tagging": true
},
{
"name": "eth1.10",
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 14]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
"type": "iana-if-type:l2vlan",
"enabled": true,
"ex-vlan:base-interface": "eth1",
"ex-vlan:vlan-id": 10
},
{
"name": "lo1",
"type": "iana-if-type:softwareLoopback",
"enabled": true
}
]
},
"ietf-interfaces:interfaces-state": {
"interface": [
{
"name": "eth0",
"type": "iana-if-type:ethernetCsmacd",
"admin-status": "down",
"oper-status": "down",
"if-index": 2,
"phys-address": "00:01:02:03:04:05",
"statistics": {
"discontinuity-time": "2013-04-01T03:00:00+00:00"
}
},
{
"name": "eth1",
"type": "iana-if-type:ethernetCsmacd",
"admin-status": "up",
"oper-status": "up",
"if-index": 7,
"phys-address": "00:01:02:03:04:06",
"higher-layer-if": [
"eth1.10"
],
"statistics": {
"discontinuity-time": "2013-04-01T03:00:00+00:00"
}
},
{
"name": "eth1.10",
"type": "iana-if-type:l2vlan",
"admin-status": "up",
"oper-status": "up",
"if-index": 9,
"lower-layer-if": [
"eth1"
],
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 15]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
"statistics": {
"discontinuity-time": "2013-04-01T03:00:00+00:00"
}
},
{
"name": "eth2",
"type": "iana-if-type:ethernetCsmacd",
"admin-status": "down",
"oper-status": "down",
"if-index": 8,
"phys-address": "00:01:02:03:04:07",
"statistics": {
"discontinuity-time": "2013-04-01T03:00:00+00:00"
}
},
{
"name": "lo1",
"type": "iana-if-type:softwareLoopback",
"admin-status": "up",
"oper-status": "up",
"if-index": 1,
"statistics": {
"discontinuity-time": "2013-04-01T03:00:00+00:00"
}
}
]
}
}
Appendix B. Change Log
RFC Editor: Remove this section upon publication as an RFC.
B.1. Changes Between Revisions -00 and -01
o Metadata encoding was moved to a separate I-D, draft-lhotka-
netmod-yang-metadata.
o JSON encoding is now defined directly rather than via XML-JSON
mapping.
o The rules for namespace encoding has changed. This affect both
node instance names and instance-identifiers.
o I-JSON-related changes. The most significant is the string
encoding of 64-bit numbers.
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 16]
Internet-Draft JSON Encoding of YANG Data October 2014
o When validating union type, the partial type info present in JSON
encoding is taken into account.
o Added section about I-JSON compliance.
o Updated the example in appendix.
o Wrote Security Considerations.
o Removed IANA Considerations as there are none.
Author's Address
Ladislav Lhotka
CZ.NIC
Email: lhotka@nic.cz
Lhotka Expires April 16, 2015 [Page 17]