René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Ability to provide type hints to non-identifier keys","articleBody":"Consider a JSON object\n\n```json\n{ \n   \"with-hyphen\": \"a-string\", \n   \"$startsWithDollarSign\": 123\n}\n```\n\n**Problem**: It's not possible to provide type-hints for `with-hyphen` and `$startsWithDolalrSign` \n\nCEL can get type information well if we can express an object as protobuf, or use `StructType`. However, there are times when we have objects that have non-identifier keys. \n\nRight now, it's not possible to provide typesafety for non-identifier keys.\n\nIt would be amazing if we could.\n\n**Alternatives considered**\n\nTo solve this for ourselves, we considered to hacks:\n1. Use aliases: walk the CEL tree, and rename all non-identifer keys to some known identifer-style key.\n2. Run our own compile step validation: walk the cel tree, and do the type checking ourselves. \n\nRight now we are going with 2., but if there was some built-in way to specify types for keys from index access, it would be amazing.\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/stopachka","@type":"Person","name":"stopachka"},"datePublished":"2025-11-21T19:10:07.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/871/cel-java/issues/871"}