[Bug]: A variable declared as an explicit readonly record does not include a reference type as one of its constituent types about ballerina-lang HOT 3 CLOSED

Looping in @HindujaB, since this is an issue specific to configurable variables.

Is your expectation to get readonly and ReadOnlyRecord as constituent types? The current behaviour may be because ReadOnlyRecord is already readonly.

The spec requirements is

The static type of a variable declared as configurable is implicitly readonly: the type specified in the type-descriptor is intersected with readonly.

So IMO, we don't really have to create an intersection type that is readonly & ReadOnlyRecord for record1, which is effectively readonly & (readonly & record { string readOnlyValue; }).

Also note that even if you did get readonly and ReadOnlyRecord as constituent types, ReadOnlyRecord will be an intersection type where one of it's constituent types will be an anonymous record type. The behaviour won't be the same as for NormalRecord, since with

public type NormalRecord record {
    string normalValue;
};

the name NormalRecord is specified for the record, whereas with

public type ReadOnlyRecord readonly & record {
    string readOnlyValue;
};

the name is for the intersection type.

from ballerina-lang.

I agree with the comment from @MaryamZi. We can't depend on the getConstituentTypes() to return a type-reference type for the first element. It can vary depending on the record descriptor. At runtime, we use a recursive method called getImpliedType() to extract the underlying record type.
There is a relevant compiler FE API, which we can use.

from ballerina-lang.

Agree with the comments. We'll check on a proper implementation for the initial requirement.

from ballerina-lang.