Ever-present fields

[Gervase Markham]

In the past, people have suggested that most fields in the Bug object 
returned by the HTTP API should be always present.

The idea is that it's easier for an API user to just check for a value 
without having to check for existence first. That would mean adding the 
following fields with the following default values to every downloaded 
Bug object:

     "attachments"            => [],
     "blocks"                 => [],
     "cc"                     => [],
     "depends_on"             => [],
     "flags"                  => [],
     "groups"                 => [],
     "is_cc_accessible"       => "0",
     "is_reporter_accessible" => "0",
     "keywords"               => [],
     "resolution"             => "",
     "url"                    => "",

(This would, of course, increase the size of every object.) However, in 
the case of the following fields, which are configurable on/off in 
Bugzilla preferences, the API user would still have to check for 
existence before checking a value.

qa_contact
classification
target_milestone
whiteboard
alias
see_also
actual_time
work_time
deadline
estimated_time
remaining_time

My suggestion is that the split between these two groups would seem to 
most Bugzilla users like an artificial distinction. Given that in the 
future, we might make more of the default fields optional or 
configurable, it seems wrong to hard-code a list of which fields are 
always present in the returned structure.

So my current plan is to only supply fields which have a value. This 
keeps data size down and avoids hardcoding "special" lists of fields. 
Let me know if you think this reasoning is wrong.

Gerv
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