In normal situations the block type name alone is enough to determine the
appropriate schema for a child, but when callers are otherwise doing
unusual pre-processing of bodies to dynamically generate schemas during
decoding they are likely to need to take similar steps while analyzing
for variables, to ensure that all of the references can be located in
spite of the not-yet-applied pre-processing.
Our API previously had a function only for retrieving the variables used
in the for_each and labels arguments used during an Expand call, and
expected callers to then interrogate the resulting expanded block to find
the other variables required to fully decode the content.
That approach is insufficient for any application that needs to know the
full set of required variables before any evaluation begins, such as when
a dependency graph will be constructed to allow a topological traversal
through blocks while evaluating.
Now we have WalkVariables, which finds both the variables used to expand
_and_ the variables within any blocks. This also renames
WalkForEachVariables to WalkExpandVariables since that name is more
accurate with the addition of the "label" argument into the expand-time
dependency set.
There is also a hcldec-based helper wrapper for each of those, allowing
single-shot analysis of blocks for applications that use hcldec.
This is a breaking change to the dynblock package API, because the old
WalkForEachVariables and ForEachVariablesHCLDec functions are no longer
present.
The previous ForEachVariables method was flawed because it didn't have
enough information to properly analyze child blocks. Since the core HCL
API requires a schema for any body analysis, and since a schema only
describes one level of configuration structure at a time, we must require
callers to drive a recursive walk through their nested block structure so
that the correct schema can be provided at each level.
This API is rather more complex than is ideal, but is the best we can do
with the HCL Body API as currently defined, and it's currently defined
that way in order to properly support ambiguous syntaxes like JSON.
This extension allows an application to support dynamic generation of
child blocks based on expressions in certain contexts. This is done using
a new block type called "dynamic", which contains an iteration value
(which must be a collection) and a specification of how to construct a
child block for each element of that collection.
Martin Atkins