Our initial prototype of new-style diff rendering excluded this because
the old SDK has no support for this construct. However, we want to be able
to introduce this construct in the new SDK without breaking compatibility
with existing versions of Terraform Core, so we need to implement it now
so it's ready to be used once the SDK implements it.
The key associated with each block allows us to properly correlate the
items to recognize the difference between an in-place update of an
existing block and the addition/deletion of a block.
Our null-to-empty normalization was previously assuming these would always
be collection types, but that isn't true when a block contains something
dynamic since we must then use tuple or object types instead to properly
represent all of the individual element types.
We are now allowing the legacy SDK to opt out of the safety checks we try
to do after plan and apply, and so in such cases the before/after values
in planned changes may be inconsistent with our usual rules.
To avoid adding lots of extra complexity to the diff renderer to deal with
these situations, instead we'll normalize the handling of nested blocks
prior to using these values.
In the long run it'd be better to do this normalization at the source,
immediately after we receive an object from a provider using the opt-out,
but we're doing this at the outermost layer for now to avoid risking
unintended impacts on other Terraform Core components when we're just
about to enter the beta phase of the v0.12.0 release cycle.
Previously we used a single plan action "Replace" to represent both the
destroy-before-create and the create-before-destroy variants of replacing.
However, this forces the apply graph builder to jump through a lot of
hoops to figure out which nodes need it forced on and rebuild parts of
the graph to represent that.
If we instead decide between these two cases at plan time, the actual
determination of it is more straightforward because each resource is
represented by only one node in the plan graph, and then we can ensure
we put the right nodes in the graph during DiffTransformer and thus avoid
the logic for dealing with deposed instances being spread across various
different transformers and node types.
As a nice side-effect, this also allows us to show the difference between
destroy-then-create and create-then-destroy in the rendered diff in the
CLI, although this change doesn't fully implement that yet.
We'll now show an "update" symbol prior to the argument to this synthetic
jsonencode(...) call, for consistency with how we show nested values in
other cases and to attach a verb to any "# forces replacement".
We'll also show a special form in the case where the value seems to differ
only in whitespace, so users can understand what's going on in that
hopefully-rare situation, particularly if those whitespace-only changes
end up forcing us to replace a remote object.
Since our own syntax for primitive values is similar to that of JSON, and
since we permit automatic conversions from number and bool to string, we
must do this special JSON value diff formatting only if the value is a
JSON array or object to avoid confusing results.
Because so far we've not supported dynamically-typed complex data
structures, several providers have used strings containing JSON to stand
in for these.
In order to get a readable diff in those cases, we'll recognize situations
where old and new are both JSON and present a diff of the effective value
of the JSON, using a faux call to the jsonencode(...) function to indicate
when we've done so.
This is a bit of a "cute" heuristic, but is important at least for now
until we can migrate away from that practice of passing large JSON strings
to providers and use dynamically-typed attributes instead.
This extra comment line gives us a place to show the full resource address
(since the block header line only includes type and name) and also allows
us to explain in long form the meaning of the change icon on the following
line.
This is a light adaptation of our earlier prototype of structural diff
rendering, as a starting point for what we'll actually ship. This is not
consistent with the latest mocks, so will need some additional work before
it is ready, but integrating this allows us to at least see the plan
contents while fixing up remaining issues elsewhere.
Martin Atkins