Conditional Validation Support in Rudder CLI Alpha

Enforce context-specific validation rules for your event schemas and custom data types.
Available Plans
  • enterprise

  •   4 minute read  

  • Date: Oct 1, 2025


RudderStack’s Tracking Plans enable data teams to apply type-safe governance to event schemas. While our governance features ensure consistency and predictability, real-world applications often require schemas to adapt based on business context.

With the release of Conditional Validation, you can now define validation rules that dynamically adjust based on discriminator properties. This powerful capability addresses a common challenge — maintaining strict data quality standards while accommodating legitimate variations in your event data structure.

With conditional validation, you can:

  • Define context-aware validation rules that adapt based on specific property values
  • Prevent event proliferation by consolidating similar events with varied requirements
  • Enforce granular validation on custom types that need to behave differently in different scenarios
  • Maintain data quality without sacrificing flexibility for legitimate business variations

You can leverage conditional validation both on the event schema level and within custom types, and manage everything via workspace configuration files using Rudder CLI.

Use cases

This section provides some examples of using the conditional validation feature.

Event-level conditional validation

  • Adaptive page tracking: Single Page Viewed event with different required properties based on page type — for example, search term for search pages, product details for product pages, checkout step for checkout pages
  • Context-aware form submissions: Different required fields based on form type or user journey stage
  • Dynamic feature usage tracking: Varying property requirements based on feature context or user role

See Event Rule Variants for more details on creating and managing event rule variants in your Tracking Plans using Rudder CLI.

Custom type conditional validation

  • Regional address formats: Different required fields for US addresses (state + ZIP) vs. UK addresses (postcode) vs. Japanese addresses (prefecture + district)
  • Manufacturer vs. marketplace products: Require MSRP and Manufacturer ID for direct products, and require Seller ID for marketplace items
  • Account tier-specific profiles: Different required profile fields for individual vs. business vs. enterprise accounts

See Custom Type Variants for more details on creating and managing custom type variants using Rudder CLI.

How it works

Conditional validation uses discriminator properties to determine which validation rules apply. A discriminator is a required property whose value triggers specific validation cases.

For example, in an ecommerce tracking scenario:

  1. Discriminator property: page_type (enumerated list defined in Data Catalog)

  2. Variant cases:

    • When page_type = search_page: Require the search_term property
    • When page_type = product: Require the product object property

Result: Same event handles both scenarios with appropriate validation.

Implementation

Conditional validation works at two levels:

Event rule variants

Define variants within your tracking-plans.yaml to create context-aware event validation:

version: "rudder/v0.1"
kind: "tp"
metadata:
  name: "ecommerce_tracking_plan"
spec:
  id: "ecommerce_tracking_plan"
  display_name: "Ecommerce Store - Tracking Plan"
  description: "Comprehensive tracking plan for the casual apparel e-commerce demo site built with React TypeScript. Captures user behavior across product discovery, cart interactions, and purchase completion for analytics and optimization."
  rules:
    - type: "event_rule"
      id: "page_viewed_rule"
      event:
        $ref: "#/events/ecommerce_events/page_viewed"
        allow_unplanned: false
      properties: 
        # Base properties required for all page views
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/page_type"
          required: true
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/page_name"
          required: false
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/page_url"
          required: false
      
      # Conditional Validation Variants
      variants:
        - type: discriminator
          discriminator: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/page_type"
          cases:
            - id: product_page
              display_name: "Product Detail Page"
              match: 
                - "product"
              description: "When user is viewing a specific product page"
              properties:
                - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product"
                  required: true
                  
            - id: search_page
              display_name: "Search Results Page"
              match: 
                - "search"
              description: "When user is on search or category pages"
              properties:
                - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/search_term"
                  required: true 
          
          # Default case for home and other pages (only page_url required)
          default:
            - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/page_url"
              required: true%

Custom type variants

Define variants within your custom-types.yaml to create reusable, context-aware object types:

version: "rudder/v0.1"
kind: "custom-types"
metadata:
  name: "ecommerce_types"
spec:
  types:
    # Product Type - Consolidates all product-related properties with conditional MSRP validation
    - id: Product_Object
      name: "Product_Object"
      description: "Custom type for product information with conditional manufacturer pricing validation"
      type: "object"
      properties:
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product_id"
          required: true
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product_sku"
          required: true
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product_name"
          required: true
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product_category"
          required: true
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product_price"
          required: true
        - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/manufacturer_pricing"
          required: false      
      # Conditional Validation Variants for Product Object
      variants:
        - type: discriminator
          discriminator: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/manufacturer_pricing"
          cases:
            - id: with_manufacturer_pricing
              display_name: "Product with Manufacturer Pricing"
              match:
                - true
              description: "Products that have manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP)"
              properties:
                - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product_msrp"
                  required: true

Deploy the changes to your workspace

rudder-cli apply -l ~/path_to_tracking_plan_dir

See the Conditional Validation documentation for more details.


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