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.
This allows basic static validation of a traversal against a schema, to
verify that it represents a valid path through the structural parts of
the schema.
The main purpose of this is to produce better error messages (using our
knowledge of the schema) than we'd be able to achieve by just relying
on HCL expression evaluation errors. This is particularly important for
nested blocks because it may not be obvious whether one is represented
internally by a set or a list, and incorrect usage would otherwise produce
a confusing HCL-oriented error message.
Martin Atkins