How do I merge multiple lists using JSON ref?

Question

I have the following YAML

- name: Core
  description: Core functionality
- name: Artifact
  description: Artifact management

# - $ref: "v1/publications.yml#/tags/"

v1/publications.yml has

tags:
  - name: Publication
    description: |
      This defines the publication API.

I sort of want the result to be I have the following YAML

- name: Core
  description: Core functionality
- name: Artifact
  description: Artifact management
- name: Publication
  description: |
    This defines the publication API.

# - $ref: "v1/publications.yml#/tags/"

I can do it one at a time like this...

- name: Core
  description: Core functionality
- name: Artifact
  description: Artifact management
- $ref: "v1/publications.yml#/tags/0"

But I want it to add multiple without updating my source.

Answer 1

This is not possible with the technologies you tagged. $ref is exactly that, a reference to an external subtree. You need sequence concatenation, which is something neither json-ref nor plain YAML or JSON provide.

You may be able to do this using some templating technology, which many YAML-based utilities provide. If you are in control of the loading code, you can also implement custom tags to do something like

- name: Core
  description: Core functionality
- name: Artifact
  description: Artifact management
- !append {$ref: "v1/publications.yml#/tags"}