The mapstructure library has a regrettable backward compatibility
concern whereby a WeakDecode of []interface{}{} into a target of
map[string]interface{} yields an empty map rather than an error. One
possibility is to switch to using Decode instead of WeakDecode, but this
loses the nice handling of type conversion, requiring a large volume of
code to be added to Terraform or HIL in order to retain that behaviour.
Instead we add a DecodeHook to our usage of the mapstructure library
which checks for decoding []interface{}{} or []string{} into a map and
returns an error instead.
This has the effect of defeating the code added to retain backwards
compatibility in mapstructure, giving us the correct (for our
circumstances) behaviour of Decode for empty structures and the type
conversion of WeakDecode.
The code is identical to that in the HIL library, and packaged into a
helper.
James Nugent