Clarify that unknown fields must be ignored when receiving OTLP/JSON …

…(#2816) * Clarify that unknown fields must be ignored when receiving OTLP/JSON Resolves open-telemetry#425 The proposed behavior is necessary for interoperability of senders and receivers when OTLP protocol evolves in an allowed way: by adding new fields to existing messages. * Remove unnecessary sentence * Fix typo Co-authored-by: Yuri Shkuro <[email protected]>
tigrannajaryan · Sep 27, 2022 · 9db4949 · 9db4949
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commit 9db4949
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diff --git a/specification/protocol/otlp.md b/specification/protocol/otlp.md
@@ -419,6 +419,11 @@ for mapping between Protobuf and JSON, with the following deviations from that m
  represented like this:
  { "kind": 2, ... }
 
+- OTLP/JSON receivers MUST ignore message fields with unknown names and MUST unmarshal the
+ message as if the unknown field was not present in the payload.
+ This aligns with the behavior of the Binary Protobuf unmarshaler and ensures that adding
+ new fields to OTLP messages does not break existing receivers.
+
 Note that according to [Protobuf specs](
 https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#json) 64-bit integer
 numbers in JSON-encoded payloads are encoded as decimal strings, and either