Flatten "properties" to avoid unnecessary nesting

[matthchr]

For example in the generated Redis types, there is a field Properties which probably ought to have its fields promoted up a level.

This is a pattern that is quite common (for example Storage account also has a Properties)

[babbageclunk]

I thought this quite often while going through the AnyType occurrences. Do you mean specifically for fields called "Properties"? Also, I'd guess we would want this to be recursive just in case there are multiple levels of Properties?

[matthchr]

Yeah, specifically the properties field on the spec.

Not sure about nested properties. That first properties field is actually an artifact of ARM (everything outside of it is "for ARM", everything inside of it is "for the RP/Service") - it's a confusing distinction for actual consumers of the API though and AutoRest supports field collapsing to squash the contents of it up into the top level object. Removing that reduces nesting and I think all ARM resources have it.

Nested properties are a different story as those may actually be in the service API?

[Porges]

I think we can automatically detect what should be processed as some of the types are marked as flatten in the Swagger specs. (But this takes us further away from the ARM JSON…)

Here’s the documentation for x-ms-client-flatten.

[babbageclunk]

Ah ok - definitely for the properties on a spec particularly.