Prior to Terraform 0.7, lists in Terraform were just a shallow abstraction
on top of strings with a magic delimiter between items. Wrapping a single
string in brackets in the configuration was Terraform's prompt that it
needed to split the string on that delimiter during interpolation.
In 0.7, when first-class lists were added, this convention was preserved
by flattening lists-of-lists by one level when they were encountered in
configuration. However, there was an oversight in that change where it
did not correctly handle the case where the inner list was unknown.
In #14135 we removed some code that was flattening partially-unknown lists
into fully-unknown (untyped) values. This inadvertently exposed the missed
case from the previous paragraph, causing issues for list-wrapped splat
expressions with unknown members. While this worked fine for resources,
due to some fixup done inside helper/schema, this did not work for other
interpolation contexts such as module blocks.
Various attempts to fix this up and restore the flattening behavior
selectively were unsuccessful, due to a proliferation of assumptions all
over the core code that would be too risky to change just to fix this bug.
This change, then, takes the different approach of removing the
requirement that splats be presented inside list brackets. This
requirement didn't make much sense anymore anyway, since no other
list-returning expression had this constraint and so the rest of Terraform
was already successfully dealing with both cases.
This leaves us with two different scenarios:
- For resource arguments, existing normalization code in helper/schema
does its own flattening that preserves compatibility with the common
practice of using bracketed splats. This change proves this with a test
within the "test" provider that exercises the whole Terraform core and
helper/schema stack that assigns bracketed splats to list and set
attributes.
- For arguments in other blocks, such as in module callsites, the
interpolator's own flattening behavior applies to known lists,
preserving compatibility with configurations from before
partially-computed splats were possible, but those wishing to use
partially-computed splats are required to drop the surrounding brackets.
This is less concerning because this scenario was introduced only in
0.9.5, so the scope for breakage is limited to those who adopted this
new feature quickly after upgrading.
As of this commit, the recommendation is to stop using brackets around
splats but the old form continues to be supported for backward
compatibility. In a future _major_ version of Terraform we will probably
phase out this legacy form to improve consistency, but for now both
forms are acceptable at the expense of some (pre-existing) weird behavior
when _actual_ lists-of-lists are used.
This addresses #14521 by officially adopting the suggested workaround of
dropping the brackets around the splat. However, it doesn't yet allow
passing of a partially-unknown list between modules: that still violates
assumptions in Terraform's core, so for the moment partially-unknown lists
work only within a _single_ interpolation expression, and cannot be
passed around between expressions. Until more holistic work is done to
improve Terraform's type handling, passing a partially-unknown splat
through to a module will result in a fully-unknown list emerging on
the other side, just as was the case before #14135; this change just
addresses the fact that this was failing with an error in 0.9.5.
This adds a unit test to the test provider that verifies count.index
behaves correctly. Although not ideal this is hard to implement as a
context test without changing around the (non helper/schema)
implementation of the x_data_source.
This set of changes addresses two bug scenarios:
(1) When an ignored change canceled a resource replacement, any
downstream resources referencing computer attributes on that resource
would get "diffs didn't match" errors. This happened because the
`EvalDiff` implementation was calling `state.MergeDiff(diff)` on the
unfiltered diff. Generally this is what you want, so that downstream
references catch the "incoming" values. When there's a potential for the
diff to change, thought, this results in problems w/ references.
Here we solve this by doing away with the separate `EvalNode` for
`ignore_changes` processing and integrating it into `EvalDiff`. This
allows us to only call `MergeDiff` with the final, filtered diff.
(2) When a resource had an ignored change but was still being replaced
anyways, the diff was being improperly filtered. This would cause
problems during apply when not all attributes were available to perform
the replacement.
We solve that by deferring actual attribute removal until after we've
decided that we do not have to replace the resource.
For a long time now, the diff logic has relied on the behavior of
`mapstructure.WeakDecode` to determine how various primitives are
converted into strings. The `schema.DiffString` function is used for
all primitive field types: TypeBool, TypeInt, TypeFloat, and TypeString.
The `mapstructure` library's string representation of booleans is "0"
and "1", which differs from `strconv.FormatBool`'s "false" and "true"
(which is used in writing out boolean fields to the state).
Because of this difference, diffs have long had the potential for
cosmetically odd but semantically neutral output like:
"true" => "1"
"false" => "0"
So long as `mapstructure.Decode` or `strconv.ParseBool` are used to
interpret these strings, there's no functional problem.
We had our first clear functional problem with #6005 and friends, where
users noticed diffs like the above showing up unexpectedly and causing
troubles when `ignore_changes` was in play.
This particular bug occurs down in Terraform core's EvalIgnoreChanges.
There, the diff is modified to account for ignored attributes, and
special logic attempts to handle properly the situation where the
ignored attribute was going to trigger a resource replacement. That
logic relies on the string representations of the Old and New fields in
the diff to be the same so that it filters properly.
So therefore, we now get a bug when a diff includes `Old: "0", New:
"false"` since the strings do not match, and `ignore_changes` is not
properly handled.
Here, we introduce `TypeBool`-specific normalizing into `finalizeDiff`.
I spiked out a full `diffBool` function, but figuring out which pieces
of `diffString` to duplicate there got hairy. This seemed like a simpler
and more direct solution.
Fixes#6005 (and potentially others!)
The ignore_changes diff filter was stripping out attributes on Create
but the diff was still making it down to the provider, so Create would
end up missing attributes, causing a full failure if any required
attributes were being ignored.
In addition, any changes that required a replacement of the resource
were causing problems with `ignore_chages`, which didn't properly filter
out the replacement when the triggering attributes were filtered out.
Refs #5627
Here we also introduce a `test` provider meant as an aid to exposing
via automated tests issues involving interactions between
`helper/schema` and Terraform core.
This has been helpful so far in diagnosing `ignore_changes` problems,
and I imagine it will be helpful in other contexts as well.
We'll have to be careful to prevent the `test` provider from becoming a
dumping ground for poorly specified tests that have a clear home
elsewhere. But for bug exposure I think it's useful to have.
Martin Atkins