Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Action schema defines links inconsistently with Thing Description

Open
#324 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
flask, python
Domain
api, backend

Research direction

Start by reviewing the current Action response schema and the Thing Description definition of links, then trace any compatibility expectations for existing action responses. This is done when the project has decided whether the representations should be aligned and the resulting behavior, documentation, and tests reflect that decision.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Thing Description defines the links property of a Thing to be an array of objects, each with "rel" and "href" properties (among others). Would it make sense for Actions to follow suit? This isn't a normative part of the spec, but it would feel quite sensible. It would mean changing from:

{
  "status": "completed",
  "output": true,
  "links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "https://my_host/actions/id"
    }
  }
}

to

{
  "status": "completed",
  "output": true,
  "links": [
    {"rel": "self", "href":"https://my_host/actions/id"},
  ]
}

The resulting object is slightly less convenient (I can't just do action["links"]["self"]["href"]) but it is more in keeping with the standard.

This is really a decision for LabThings-FastAPI, but I'm keen not to break compatibility if there was a good reason for doing it the current way.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
19
Forks
2
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from labthings/python-labthings

All issues in labthings/python-labthings

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.