Notice field on questions may be absent?

Question

The notice type, that is a field of a question, appears to be optional, yet it is not marked as "may be absent"?

For example, when I request questions with a filter that has the notice field checked, not one seems to actually return the field.

Is this a mistake in the documentation or am I misinterpreting it?

Answer 1

Yes, officially this is a documentation bug. From the Absent Fields doc:

Fields that are not always guaranteed to be set... are indicated in the per-type documentation. Any discrepency(sic) between observed behavior and the documentation should be reported on Stack Apps.

(Emphasis added and note that "discrepancy" is mispellerized. ;) )

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notice obviously should have the may be absent flag.

I eyeballed all of the other properties of type question, as well as type answer and type user. I didn't spot any other obvious discrepancies with the may be absent flag.

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Re:

The notice type, that is a field of a question, appears to be optional, yet it is not marked as "may be absent"?

Optional and may be absent are separate dimensions.

• "Optional" -- means you must craft/use a custom filter to get the property.
• "May be absent" -- means that even if called for by the filter, the property will still not be returned if the property's value is null for that particular question.