Byte arrays with fewer than 10 elements are incorrectly deserialized as integer arrays due to heuristic detection

[PastaPastaPasta]

Expected Behavior

Short byte arrays (fewer than 10 bytes) should be properly deserialized as Value::Bytes when converting from JSON to Value. For example, a 6-byte array representing a MAC address or a 4-byte IPv4 address should remain as bytes.

Current Behavior

The From for Value implementation uses a heuristic that only treats arrays as byte arrays if they have 10 or more elements and all values are in the range [0, 255]. Arrays with fewer than 10 elements are always converted to Value::Array, even when they represent binary data.

This means:

• [0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF] → Value::Array (4 bytes, treated as integers)
• [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] → Value::Array (6 bytes, MAC address lost)
• [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] → Value::Bytes (10+ elements triggers heuristic)

Relevant code in packages/rs-platform-value/src/converter/serde_json.rs:221-242:
if len >= 10
&& array.iter().all(|v| {
let Some(int) = v.as_u64() else {
return false;
};
int.le(&u8_max)
})
{
//this is an array of bytes
Self::Bytes(...)
}

The code even acknowledges this with //todo: hacky solution, to fix.

Possible Solution

Remove the heuristic entirely and use explicit type information from the schema/context to determine if an array should be bytes. Options:

1. Schema-aware conversion: Pass document type property information to the conversion function to know when a field is defined as byteArray: true
2. Explicit wrapper: Use a different JSON representation for bytes (e.g., base64 string or {"$bytes": [...]})
3. Conversion context parameter: Add an optional parameter to specify expected types during conversion

Alternatives Considered

• Lower the threshold: Reducing from 10 to a smaller number (e.g., 1) would fix short byte arrays but would incorrectly convert all small integer arrays to bytes
• Base64 encoding in JSON: Always represent bytes as base64 strings in JSON (this is already done in TryInto but not consistently used)

Additional Context

The same heuristic is duplicated at lines 267-283 for the From<&JsonValue> implementation and would need to be fixed in both places.