There is some existing practice in the "terraform" package of returning
a special error type ValidationError from EvalNode implementations in
order to return warnings without halting the graph walk even though a
non-nil error was returned.
This is a diagnostics-flavored version of that approach, allowing us to
avoid totally reworking the EvalNode concept around diagnostics and
retaining the ability to return non-fatal errors.
NonFatalErr is equivalent to the former terraform.ValidationError, while
ErrWithWarnings is a helper that automatically treats any errors as
fatal but returns NonFatalError if the diagnostics contains only warnings.
While diagnostics are primarily designed for reporting problems in
configuration, they can also be used for errors and warnings about the
environment Terraform is running in, such as inability to reach a remote
service, etc.
Function Sourceless makes it easy to produce such diagnostics with the
customary summary/detail structure. When these diagnostics are rendered
they will have no source code snippet and will instead just include the
English-language content.
cty doesn't have a native string representation of a cty.Path because it
is the layer below any particular syntax, but up here in Terraform land
we know that we use HCL native syntax and so we can format a string in
a HCL-ish way for familiarity to the user.
We'll use this form automatically when such an error is used directly as a
diagnostic, but we also expose the function publicly so that other code
that incorporates errors into diagnostic detail strings can apply the
same formatting.
The usual usage of diagnostics requires us to pass around source location
information to everywhere that might generate a diagnostic, and that is
always the best way to get the most precise diagnostic source locations.
However, it's impractical to require source location information to be
retained in every Terraform subsystem, and so this new idea of "contextual
diagnostics" allows us to separate the generation of a diagnostic from
the resolution of its source location, instead resolving the location
information as a post-processing step once the call stack unwinds to a
place where there is enough context to find it.
This is necessarily a less precise approach than reading the source ranges
directly from the configuration AST, but gives us an alternative to no
diagnostics at all in portions of Terraform where full location
information is not available.
This is a best-effort sort of thing which will get as precise as it can
but may return a range in a parent block if the precise location of a
particular attribute cannot be found. Diagnostics that rely on this
mechanism should include some other contextual information in the detail
message to make up for any loss of precision that results.
Previously we were showing only the summaries when converting to a string
error, but HCL generates summaries that indicate only the _type_ of error,
expecting that the detail will give the details, and so we need to show
both in order to produce a useful error message.
HCL will be the most frequent origin of a source range, so this helper
should make it easier to translate these between the two worlds so we
can more easily use them in native Terraform diagnostics and other
messaging.
Due to the use of interfaces, Diagnostics is not super-friendly to the gob
encoding we currently use for plugin RPC. To mitigate this, we provide
a helper that converts all of the wrapped objects into a predictable flat
structure that we can pre-emptively register with gob.
This means that the decoded Diagnostics still has the same meaning as
the original, though the original wrapped errors (if any) are lost and
thus our errwrap integration won't be effective any longer.
Currently we lean heavily on the Go error type as our primary means of
describing errors, and along with that use several more specialized
implementations of it in different spots for additional capabilities such
as multiple errors in one object, source code range references, etc.
We also have a rather ad-hoc approach of returning an array of warnings
from certain functions along with one or multiple errors.
This rather-disorganized approach makes it hard for us to present
user-facing error messages consistently. As a step towards mitigating
this, package tfdiags provides a model for user-facing error and warning
messages and helper functions for creating them from various other
error and warning types used elsewhere in Terraform.
This mechanism is intended to be used to report errors and warnings where
the audience is the Terraform user, and so it may go a few layers deep
down the call stack into codepaths like config parsing, interpolation, etc
but is primarily a UX concern. The deepest reaches of Terraform core will
continue using "error" as normal, with higher layers preparing error
messages for presentation to the user.
To avoid needing to change the interface of every function that might
generate error diagnostics, the Diagnostics type can be "smuggled" via
an error value through other APIs and then unwrapped at the other end,
though it will lose any naked warnings (without at least one error) along
the way, and so codepaths that are expected to generate warnings
(validation, primarily) should use the concrete Diagnostics type
throughout the call chain.
Martin Atkins