In earlier Terraform versions we had an extra validation step prior to
the graph walk which tried to partially validate root module input
variable values (just checking their type constraints) and then return
error messages which specified as accurately as possible where the value
had originally come from.
We're now handling that sort of validation exclusively during the graph
walk so that we can share the main logic between both root module and
child module variable values, but previously that shared code wasn't
able to generate such specific information about where the values had
originated, because it was adapted from code originally written to only
deal with child module variables.
Here then we restore a similar level of detail as before, when we're
processing root module variables. For child module variables, we use
synthetic InputValue objects which state that the value was declared
in the configuration, thus causing us to produce a similar sort of error
message as we would've before which includes a source range covering
the argument expression in the calling module block.
Previously we had a significant discrepancy between these two situations:
we wrote the raw root module variables directly into the EvalContext and
then applied type conversions only at expression evaluation time, while
for child modules we converted and validated the values while visiting
the variable graph node and wrote only the _final_ value into the
EvalContext.
This confusion seems to have been the root cause for #29899, where
validation rules for root module variables were being applied at the wrong
point in the process, prior to type conversion.
To fix that bug and also make similar mistakes less likely in the future,
I've made the root module variable handling more like the child module
variable handling in the following ways:
- The "raw value" (exactly as given by the user) lives only in the graph
node representing the variable, which mirrors how the _expression_
for a child module variable lives in its graph node. This means that
the flow for the two is the same except that there's no expression
evaluation step for root module variables, because they arrive as
constant values from the caller.
- The set of variable values in the EvalContext is always only "final"
values, after type conversion is complete. That in turn means we no
longer need to do "just in time" conversion in
evaluationStateData.GetInputVariable, and can just return the value
exactly as stored, which is consistent with how we handle all other
references between objects.
This diff is noisier than I'd like because of how much it takes to wire
a new argument (the raw variable values) through to the plan graph builder,
but those changes are pretty mechanical and the interesting logic lives
inside the plan graph builder itself, in NodeRootVariable, and
the shared helper functions in eval_variable.go.
While here I also took the opportunity to fix a historical API wart in
EvalContext, where SetModuleCallArguments was built to take a set of
variable values all at once but our current caller always calls with only
one at a time. That is now just SetModuleCallArgument singular, to match
with the new SetRootModuleArgument to deal with root module variables.
This is part of a general effort to move all of Terraform's non-library
package surface under internal in order to reinforce that these are for
internal use within Terraform only.
If you were previously importing packages under this prefix into an
external codebase, you could pin to an earlier release tag as an interim
solution until you've make a plan to achieve the same functionality some
other way.
Martin Atkins