Ensuring lists have no duplicate items | CUE

language

In CUE, you often will work with lists of all sorts of values. To ensure a list has no duplicate items, use list.UniqueItems.

Strings

import "list"

items: ["a", "b", "c", "a"]
items: list.UniqueItems

Integers

import "list"

items: [1, 2, 3, 1]
items: list.UniqueItems

Note that this approach does not work correctly on non-integer values. See issue #2192 for details.

Structs

A common issue is we have a list of structs, each with some key that must be unique across all items in the list.

To ensure a list of structs has no duplicate keys, one common approach is to guarantee that the list has no duplicate items by constructing the list from a map.

_items: {
	joe: age:   30
	alice: age: 35
}
_items: [name=string]: "name": name

items: [
	for item in _items {
		item
	},
]

If the list must be constrained directly, you can write an auxiliary field that creates a mapping from the keys

items: [
	{
		name: "joe"
		age:  30
	},
	{
		name: "alice"
		age:  35
	},
	{
		name: "joe"
		age:  31
	},
]
_itemsCheck: {
	for i, item in items {
		(item.name): i
	}
}

If the key is specified twice, there will be a conflict in _itemsCheck.

Ensuring multiple keys to have no duplicates

If there are multiple keys that together must be unique, a similar approach can be used, using json.Marshal to form a composite string key from the keys. Here, for example, the combination of name and dateOfBirth must be unique:

import "encoding/json"

items: [
	{
		name:        "joe"
		dateOfBirth: "1983-10-21"
		country:     "US"
	},
	{
		name:        "alice"
		dateOfBirth: "1987-10-15"
		country:     "DE"
	},
	{
		name:        "joe"
		dateOfBirth: "2010-02-05"
		country:     "UK"
	},
	{
		name:        "alice"
		dateOfBirth: "1987-10-15"
		country:     "BE"
	},
]
_itemsCheck: {
	for i, item in items {
		(json.Marshal([item.name, item.dateOfBirth])): i
	}
}