Validating & Exporting

Parse and export

KCL is both a validator and a parser, so the same source drives type-checking and serialization.

Parse and print the composed contract to standard output. This is where type errors and failed constraints surface — if a required field is missing or a value violates a constraint, the build fails here rather than in production:

kcl run contract.k

Export to YAML (or JSON) by choosing the output format:

kcl run contract.k --format yaml > contract.yaml   # YAML
kcl run contract.k --format json > contract.json   # JSON

The exported contract.yaml is the finished ODCS document, generated from your typed KCL — and this is where apiVersion: v3.1.0 and kind: DataContract reappear, supplied by the schema defaults you never had to write.

The just export shortcut

In the repository, the export step is wrapped in the Justfile. Running:

just export

parses the project's root contract and writes the result to enkinex-odcs-tutorial/contract.yaml — the same final document, produced in one step.

Wrapping up

Starting from an untyped YAML document, we rebuilt the ODCS full example as a typed, modular KCL project: contract metadata, access and ownership, the server, and the dataset schema, each in its own small file, composed by a root that reads like a table of contents. The result is validated at build time, and its parts are reusable across contracts — governance kept as code in the repository, rather than copied between YAML files.

The complete project is on GitHub under enkinex-odcs-tutorial