TRAC data types

TRAC supports the following primary data types when defining model and data schemas.

BOOLEAN	A true/false value
INTEGER	A 64 bit signed integer
FLOAT	A 64 bit signed floating point number (referred to as ‘double’ in many languages)
STRING	UTF encoded string value of arbitrary length. The encoding used (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-16) varies between languages / platforms, generally TRAC will present strings using the standard encoding for a given language or protocol.
DECIMAL	A fixed-point decimal value with known precision and scale. The available precision and scale may vary between languages / platforms.
DATE	A date value. Dates do not take any account of time zones or offsets from UTC.
DATETIME	Date-time values may be expressed with an offset from UTC, as per ISO 8601. The available sub-second precision may vary depending on language / platform. For metadata attributes, TRAC represents all date-times as in UTC with microsecond precision. Incoming values will be converted to UTC if they are supplied with an offset.

Note

Finer-grained data validation rules can be expressed in model code and are handled within the TRAC runtime. This list is just the primary data types which are guaranteed at the platform level.

In addition to these primitive types, you can also use:

ARRAY	An array of values, which may be primitive or composite values. All items in an array must have the same type (i.e. the same type descriptor).
MAP	An key-value map with string keys. Maps may be uniform, in which case all the values are of the same type, or non-uniform in which case values can be of any type. For uniform maps the type descriptor will specify the type contained in the map. For non-uniform maps the type descriptor can only specify that the map is non-uniform, values must be examined at run time to determine their type.

The platform enforces strict type matching when combining model objects into a flow and when selecting data inputs for a RunModel or RunFlow job.