In study of existing providers we've found a pattern we werent previously
accounting for of using a nested block type to represent a group of
arguments that relate to a particular feature that is always enabled but
where it improves configuration readability to group all of its settings
together in a nested block.
The existing NestingSingle was not a good fit for this because it is
designed under the assumption that the presence or absence of the block
has some significance in enabling or disabling the relevant feature, and
so for these always-active cases we'd generate a misleading plan where
the settings for the feature appear totally absent, rather than showing
the default values that will be selected.
NestingGroup is, therefore, a slight variation of NestingSingle where
presence vs. absence of the block is not distinguishable (it's never null)
and instead its contents are treated as unset when the block is absent.
This then in turn causes any default values associated with the nested
arguments to be honored and displayed in the plan whenever the block is
not explicitly configured.
The current SDK cannot activate this mode, but that's okay because its
"legacy type system" opt-out flag allows it to force a block to be
processed in this way anyway. We're adding this now so that we can
introduce the feature in a future SDK without causing a breaking change
to the protocol, since the set of possible block nesting modes is not
extensible.
We were using the wrong cty operation to access map members, causing a
panic whenever a prior value was present for a resource type with a nested
block backed by a map value.
Since these error messages get printed in Terraform's output and we
encourage users to share them as part of bug reports, we should avoid
including sensitive information in them to reduce the risk of accidental
exposure.
Completing our set of provider result safety-check functions,
AssertPlanValid checks a result from a provider's PlanResourceChange to
make sure it doesn't propose a change that is not valid within the user
model of Terraform.
Specifically, it forbids the provider from planning a value that
contradicts what the user gave in configuration, which is important to
ensure that making a reference to an attribute elsewhere in the
configuration will produce exactly the given result, as users reasonably
expect.
Providers _are_ allowed (and, in fact, required) to make changes to
any Computed attribute values declared in the schema in order to fill in
the default values that the provider has generated. Later checks during
the apply phase will ensure that the provider remains true to these
planned values, to ensure that Terraform can keep its promise of doing
exactly what was planned or presenting an error explaining why not.
Martin Atkins