Should I just do a validate check before coercing?

And actually, I'm not sure I can easily do that in this context. I'm using reitit w/ malli request coercion and I need it to leave my strings alone, but it converts them to keywords.

perhaps coercion should short-circuit if the value already validates?

probably some performance implications to all of this

Or should already short-circuit on first valid value. It has a (small) performance penalty to validate after decode, but think it's the only way to make it work

yeah, I guess it's the decode step that's doing the string -> keyword change. I'm using the json-transformer but trying to leave strings as strings. this is not a map key. but the [:or :keyword :string] schema seems to decode the string to a keyword. unless I'm misunderstanding...

use [:or :string :keyword]?

yeah, I had thought I couldn't b/c I need EDN to stay as keywords when using that. but then I remembered that that won't activate the json-transformer in the first place. so that might be the key!

yeah that seems to work. glad it was a simple PEBKAC error! thanks!