# Conditional Validation Support in Rudder CLI


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:

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

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

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:

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:

yaml 
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:
            - display_name: "Product Detail Page"
              match: 
                - "product"
              description: "When user is viewing a specific product page"
              properties:
                - $ref: "#/properties/ecommerce_properties/product"
                  required: true
                  
            - 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:

yaml 
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:
            - 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

bash 
rudder-cli apply -l ~/path_to_tracking_plan_dir

See the Conditional Validation documentation for more details.