At first glance, it seems logical to expect the mashup engine to error if you attempt to ascribe a seemingly incompatible type to a value. Surprisingly, this doesn’t always occur.

During ascription, the engine validates that the type’s base type matches the value’s base type (so, for example, you can’t ascribe type logical onto a date value because the two base types are different). However, for types with children, those child types (list’s item type, record’s field types, table’s column types and function’s argument and return type assertions) have no effect on mashup engine behavior and are not validated for compatibility. What?!

For example, you can ascribe an item type of text onto a list of numbers, and the mashup engine won’t complain. Ascribe a column type of logical onto a column containing dates and M will comply. Similar holds true for records: a field type of duration can be ascribed onto a field containing a function and no error is raised.

Value.ReplaceType({1, 2, 3 }, type { text })
Value.ReplaceType(#table({"Col1"}, {{ #date(2020, 6, 24)}}), type table [Col1 = logical])
Value.ReplaceType([FieldA = () => ...], type [FieldA = duration])

For functions, the newly ascribed type’s argument and return type assertions aren’t validated or enforced; instead, the assertions specified when the function was originally defined continue to be what the engine follows. Take a function argument originally defined as number and ascribe as text to it. Despite the ascription, the mashup engine will expect the argument’s value to be compatible with number, not text, when the function is invoked.

let
  Func = (input as number) as number => input,
  NewType = type function (input as text) as text,
  Ascribed = Value.ReplaceType(Func, NewType)
in
  Ascribed("hi") // errors
  // Ascribed(1) // works fine  

Speaking of things not validated during ascription: Don’t forget what we learned last time about how child component names (record field names, table column names and function parameter names) are not checked, even though bad things can happen when the names on the new type don’t align with the names on the value. M will allow you to, say, ascribe a table type whose first column is named Amount onto a table whose first column is named Amt, even though code that later works with that table may misbehave because of the name mismatch.

These behaviors seem strange—and they aren’t the only strangeness related to Power Query’s types. Comparing type values may also not work the way you expect. Think TypeValueA = TypeValueB will return true if the two types are identical? Maybe. Maybe not!

Fasten your seat belt. We’ll try to define and then clear up a bit of this confusion. It will be a journey! Here we go….

Series Index

• Introduction, Simple Expressions & let (part 1)
• Functions: Defining (part 2)
• Functions: Function Values, Passing, Returning, Defining Inline, Recursion (part 3)
• Variables & Identifiers (part 4)
• Paradigm (part 5)
• Types—Intro & Text (Strings) (part 6)
• Types—Numbers (part 7)
• Types—The Temporal Family (part 8)
• Types—Logical, Null, Binary (part 9)
• Types—List, Record (part 10)
• Tables—Syntax (part 11)
• Tables—Table Think I (part 12)
• Tables—Table Think II (part 13)
• Control Structure (part 14)
• Error Handling (part 15)
• Type System I – Basics (part 16)
• Type System II – Facets (part 17)
• Type System III – Custom Types (part 18)
• Type System IV – Ascription, Conformance and Equality’s “Strange” Behaviors (part 19) [this post]
• More to come!

After gaining a solid grasp on type system basics and exploring type facets, it’s now time to learn about complex types (also known as custom types or derived types). Thankfully, constructing these types isn’t very complex. Don’t worry, though, we’ll make up for that simplicity when we talk about how M handles them!

Let’s dive right in. To keep things simple, the focus for this post is syntax and conformance rules. We’ll save most of the discussion about how M works with these types for the next post in this series.

“Conformance—that sounds complicated!” you might be thinking. Actually, no. Just the name makes it sound that way. Saying that a value conforms to a type means that the value can be described by the given type, or to put it in other words, the value is compatible with the type. So, the numeric value 1 conforms to types number, nullable number, anynonnull and any because each of those types can be used to describe that value. Conformance rules, simply put, are the rules used to determine whether a value conforms to—is described by—a type.

Now, on to the custom types!