Arrays of complex type always evaluate to ARRAY<STRING>?

[pt-jake]

Arrays of complex types seemingly always evaluate to ARRAY<STRING>. Therefore, casting or attempting to load JSON data with empty array values fails. For example, attempting to cast a JSON value of {"likes": []...} on load to the following table schema fail with the following error:

Schema:

array<struct<gid:string,user:struct<gid:string,name:string,resource_type:string>>>

Error:

"Error copy: [DATATYPE_MISMATCH.CAST_WITHOUT_SUGGESTION] Cannot resolve "likes" due to data type mismatch: cannot cast "ARRAY<STRING>" to "ARRAY<STRUCT<gid: STRING, user: STRUCT<gid: STRING, name: STRING, resource_type: STRING>>>"

What is the best way to handle empty/null complex-typed arrays?

[Anonymous]

Hi @Jake Neyer​ 

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