#6560 [BUG] [flytekit] FlyteFile/Directory to_dict behavior changes Issue created by wild-endeavor Flyte & Flytekit version Latest flytekit Describe the bug Basically if I have a FlyteFile object, the

to_dict

is a little different depending on whether or not it's in a dataclass. Basically these show different things.

ff = FlyteFile("<gs://foo/bar.txt>")
ff_dict = ff.to_dict()
print(ff_dict)

@dataclass
class Car(DataClassJSONMixin):
    wheels: list[FlyteFile]

c = Car(wheels=[FlyteFile("<gs://foo/bar.txt>")])
cc_dict = c.to_dict()
print(cc_dict)

The first case actually just returns an empty dict

{}

. Some GPT-powered digging reveals that the root cause of this behavior is a combination of •

FlyteFile

having its own

__init__

function •

FlyteFile

inheriting from both

SerializableType

and

DataClassJSONMixin

The example above has been partially copied into this branch. Adding the

to_dict

override does indeed work for serializing but didn't add from_dict yet. Didn't look into what the correct signature is. Expected behavior Ideally common functions like

to/from_dict

and

to/from_json

should behave correctly (not have surprising behavior) and should be consistent whether used in a dataclass or used by itself. We should fix flytekit if possible but it's also more important that we get this right in the v2 sdk. Note that in v2, File/Dir are now Pydantic models so this may just be fixed (but we should add tests there to ensure they work). Any fix needs to not break any other users of course. If for some reason it's undesirable to have these

to/from_dict/json

functions, we should document and maybe go as far as to implement them as raise Exception and explain why. (for both v1 and v2). Are you sure this issue hasn't been raised already? • Yes Have you read the Code of Conduct? • Yes flyteorg/flyte