AnyValue diverging from spec on website

[bripkens]

Hey folks,

we noticed that the documentation on the OTel website for attributes and the OTLP definition for AnyValue are slightly different. More specifically, OTLP accepts a wider range of values – specifically bytes and KeyValueList. Consequently, some questions came up:

• In what situation would one see a bytes or KeyValueList?
• Should this be corrected on the website? Or maybe explained via a code comment in OTLP?

OTLP

opentelemetry-proto/opentelemetry/proto/common/v1/common.proto

Lines 28 to 40 in 81a296f

	message AnyValue {
	// The value is one of the listed fields. It is valid for all values to be unspecified
	// in which case this AnyValue is considered to be "empty".
	oneof value {
	string string_value = 1;
	bool bool_value = 2;
	int64 int_value = 3;
	double double_value = 4;
	ArrayValue array_value = 5;
	KeyValueList kvlist_value = 6;
	bytes bytes_value = 7;
	}
	}

Website (source)

[tigrannajaryan]

Logs require it: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/logs/data-model/#type-any

There is an open spec issue to allow traces and metrics to also use KeyValueList: open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#376

[bripkens]

Awesome, thank you for the clarification @tigrannajaryan!