Mule#4: RAML not able to parse JSON in escape characters - bad-request

Question

I have following schema declared in RAML 1.0
body:
application/json:
type: object
properties:
region:
example:
strict: false
value: NA
type: string
required: true
country:
description: Country name
example:
strict: false
value: US
type: string
required: true
orders:
type: array
items:
properties:
orderName:
example:
strict: false
value: "toys"
type: string
maxLength: 20
required: false
orderNumber:
example:
strict: false
value: order12
type: string
maxLength: 25
required: false
maxItems: 100
required: true
When I am sending the below JSON request
{
"region": "South America",
"country": "US",
"orders": [
"{\n \"orderNumber\": \"ORD0118\",\n \"orderName\": \"toys\"\n}",
"{\n \"orderNumber\": \"ORD0119\",\n \"orderName\": \"pens\"\n}",
"{\n \"orderNumber\": \"ORD0120\",\n \"orderName\": \"pencils\"\n}"
]
}
In batch when I am aggregating message and concatenating the payload, the payload was getting formatted as above.
I am seeing a bad request error
Position: Line 0, Column 0\n/orders/0 expected type: JSONObject, found: String Location: Position: Line 0, Column 0\n/orders/1 expected type: JSONObject, found: String Location: Position: Line 0, Column 0\n/orders/2 expected type: JSONObject, found: String Location: Position: Line 0, Column 0",
Please help me in updating RAML to accept the JSON in escape characters as well.

Answer 1

The payload's orders attribute is a list of strings, not of objects, because the members of the array are 'escaped'. Depending on what you intend to do, you can change the RAML to set the array to an array of strings, or convert somehow the strings to the objects the RAML expects.
For the former replace the definition of orders by something like:
orders:
type: string[]
If you want to do the later the following DataWeave script will transform the list in the expected objects:
%dw 2.0
output application/json
---
{
region: payload.region,
country: payload.country,
orders: payload.orders map read($,"application/json")
}
Output:
{
"region": "South America",
"country": "US",
"orders": [
{
"orderNumber": "ORD0118",
"orderName": "toys"
},
{
"orderNumber": "ORD0119",
"orderName": "pens"
},
{
"orderNumber": "ORD0120",
"orderName": "pencils"
}
]
}

Answer 2

Enabling the preserve MIME types in batch aggregator solved this issue.