There have been a few questions about this so far which indicated that the
previous docs for this feature were very lacking. This is an attempt to
describe more completely what "any" means, and in particular that it isn't
actually a type at all but rather a placeholder for a type to be selected
dynamically.
Based on some common questions and feedback since the v0.12.0 release,
here we add some small additional content to the documentation for
"dynamic" blocks, covering how to access the keys of the collection being
iterated over and how to fold multiple collections into a single one to
achieve the effect of a nested iteration.
These follow the same principle as jsondecode and jsonencode, but use
YAML instead of JSON.
YAML has a much more complex information model than JSON, so we can only
support a subset of it during decoding, but hopefully the subset supported
here is a useful one.
Because there are many different ways to _generate_ YAML, the yamlencode
function is forced to make some decisions, and those decisions are likely
to affect compatibility with other real-world YAML parsers. Although the
format here is intended to be generic and compatible, we may find that
there are problems with it that'll we'll want to adjust for in a future
release, so yamlencode is therefore marked as experimental for now until
the underlying library is ready to commit to ongoing byte-for-byte
compatibility in serialization.
The main use-case here is met by yamldecode, which will allow reading in
files written in YAML format by humans for use in Terraform modules, in
situations where a higher-level input format than direct Terraform
language declarations is helpful.
This is similar to the function of the same name in Python, generating a
sequence of numbers as a list that can then be used in other
sequence-oriented operations.
The primary use-case for it is to turn a count expressed as a number into
a list of that length, which can then be iterated over or passed to a
collection function to produce that number of something else, as shown
in the example at the end of its documentation page.
We've seen in the past that some users try to use this form with the
ssh:// URL prefix, so we'll mention explicitly that this is invalid and
show a working example of how to use it without the URL scheme prefix.
- Note that we intentionally omitted it from the sidebar, to reduce confusion.
- Write a summary up top so you can stop reading sooner if you don't actually need this.
* lang/funcs: testing of functions through the lang package API
The function-specific unit tests do not cover the HCL conversion that happens when the functions are called in a terraform configuration. For e.g., HCL converts sets to lists before passing it to the function. This means that we could not test passing a set in the function _unit_ tests.
This adds a higher-level acceptance test, plus a check that every (pure) function has a test.
* website/docs: update function documentation
There was some leftover v0.11-style interpolation syntax here.
We prefer to use a "naked" expression in situations like this where the result
isn't a string, because interpolations returning non-strings is a common source
of confusion for new users.
* funcs/coalesce: return the first non-null, non-empty element from a
sequence.
The go-cty coalesce function, which was originally used here, returns the
first non-null element from a sequence. Terraform 0.11's coalesce,
however, returns the first non-empty string from a list of strings.
This new coalesce function aims to preserve terraform's documented
functionality while adding support for additional argument types. The
tests include those in go-cty and adapted tests from the 0.11 version of
coalesce.
* website/docs: update coalesce function document
The re-introduction of some of the ambiguity between argument and nested
block syntax (for compatibility with existing provider patterns)
unfortunately leads to some interesting consequences for attributes using
this mode.
While the behavior is generally as before in straightforward cases, this
page aims to spell out some of the different usage patterns explicitly
for the benefit of those writing more complex configurations, such as
generic re-usable modules where using argument vs. block syntax leads to
some real differences.
This page is intentionally not linked from anywhere in the part of the
website maintained in the Terraform repository. Instead, it can be linked
from the provider documentation for any argument where this pattern is
used, to help users understand the ways in which that argument might
deviate from the usual behaviors of arguments vs. nested blocks.
Chris Griggs