Just riffing to see what this _might_ look like.

[breedx-splk]

I primarily wanted to see how interesting/painful it might be to set the payload to an arbitrary value or primitive (eg. AnyValue.of(Long) or whatever. This was motivated by @scheler pointing out that open-telemetry#6813 doesn't quite match the language in the spec, and some users might have a need for this (especially in the case of String).

Mostly offering this here for discussion. @jack-berg has already responded in open-telemetry#6813 that he'd like to add this on later, so we can definitely defer until later or until it's specifically asked for.

At least trying this out helped me to understand that adding it on later is straightforward given the API implementation in open-telemetry#6813, and that we weren't making it too difficult.

[breedx-splk]

This might be the grossest part of this. It's also a little weird of an API because the builder could get reused and it's a bit of a chimera -- handling both simple types and complex types. Like, a confused user might call put(), put(), put() then setPayload() then put(), put(), put() again.

Not sure why you'd ever want to or why one might think that should work, but it's possible. Just wanted to point it out.

[jack-berg]

handling both simple types and complex types. Like, a confused user might call put(), put(), put() then setPayload() then put(), put(), put() again.

Yeah in my head we'd solve this by having a nullable reference to the user set AnyValue payload. And then down in emit, if explicit payload was set, it takes priority over any calls to put. Something like:

@Nullable private AnyValue<?> explicitPayload;

...

public EventBuilder setPayload(AnyValue<?> payload) {
  this.explicitPayload = payloadl;
  return this;
}

...

@Override
public void emit() {
  if (explicitPayload != null) {
     ((ExtendedLogRecordBuilder) logRecordBuilder).setBody(explicitPayload);
  } else if (!payload.isEmpty()) {
    ((ExtendedLogRecordBuilder) logRecordBuilder).setBody(AnyValue.of(payload));
  }
  if (!hasTimestamp) {
    logRecordBuilder.setTimestamp(clock.now(), TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS);
  }
  logRecordBuilder.setAttribute(EVENT_NAME, eventName);
  logRecordBuilder.emit();
}

Potential to cause confusion to users, but can mitigate with javadoc explaining the behavior. You might say that this might be cause to remove / change the put(String, ?) methods, but I think that those are absolutely crucial from an ergonomics perspective.

[breedx-splk]

Yeah that's cool, the null was another approach that occurred to me, and I think the usability is fine and maybe slightly cleaner impl. I agree that those put() calls cannot go away!

[breedx-splk]

I think the API has moved well beyond this now. 🍻