Merge two Json Schemas - jsonschema

Question

I am new to JSON and JSON schema validation.
I have the following schema to validate a single employee object:
{
"$schema":"http://json-schema.org/draft-03/schema#",
"title":"Employee Type Schema",
"type":"object",
"properties":
{
"EmployeeID": {"type": "integer","minimum": 101,"maximum": 901,"required":true},
"FirstName": {"type": "string","required":true},
"LastName": {"type": "string","required":true},
"JobTitle": {"type": "string"},
"PhoneNumber": {"type": "string","required":true},
"Email": {"type": "string","required":true},
"Address":
{
"type": "object",
"properties":
{
"AddressLine": {"type": "string","required":true},
"City": {"type": "string","required":true},
"PostalCode": {"type": "string","required":true},
"StateProvinceName": {"type": "string","required":true}
}
},
"CountryRegionName": {"type": "string"}
}
}
and I have the following schema to validate an array of the same employee object:
{
"$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-03/schema#",
"title": "Employee set",
"type": "array",
"items":
{
"type": "object",
"properties":
{
"EmployeeID": {"type": "integer","minimum": 101,"maximum": 301,"required":true},
"FirstName": {"type": "string","required":true},
"LastName": {"type": "string","required":true},
"JobTitle": {"type": "string"},
"PhoneNumber": {"type": "string","required":true},
"Email": {"type": "string","required":true},
"Address":
{
"type": "object",
"properties":
{
"AddressLine": {"type": "string","required":true},
"City": {"type": "string","required":true},
"PostalCode": {"type": "string","required":true},
"StateProvinceName": {"type": "string","required":true}
}
},
"CountryRegionName": {"type": "string"}
}
}
}
Can you please show me how to merge them so that way I can use one single schema to validate both single employee object or an entire collection. Thanks.

Answer 1

(Note: this question was also asked on the JSON Schema Google Group, and this answer is adapted from there.)
With "$ref", you can have something like this for your array:
{
"type": "array",
"items": {"$ref": "/schemas/path/to/employee"}
}
If you want something to be an array or a single item, then you can use "oneOf":
{
"oneOf": [
{"$ref": "/schemas/path/to/employee"}, // the root schema, defining the object
{
"type": "array", // the array schema.
"items": {"$ref": "/schemas/path/to/employee"}
}
]
}
The original Google Groups answer also contains some advice on using "definitions" to organise schemas so all these variants can exist in the same file.