[wildfly-dev] Fixing handling of 'required' attributes with 'alternatives'

[Brian Stansberry]

tl;dr;

It’s not an uncommon thing to have a management attribute A that is required; i.e. must be set, but also has an alternative attribute B, where setting B satisfies the requirement for A, making an undefined value for A legal. We’re not handling that correctly and I want to fix it.[1] But fixing it will require some coordination with the HAL console. 

Right now the way AttributeDefinition building works it’s not practical to declare that an attribute is required but only if no alternative is set. So instead attributes are declared as if they aren’t really required. This leads to less than helpful input validation, e.g. [2] and [3], since the attribute definition is imprecise.

The change I’d like to make will alter the read-resource-description output for 4 attributes, changing the value of the ‘nillable’ description from ‘false’ to ‘true’ so I want to coordinate that with the console team. 

Long version

Harald and Claudio you guys are the main audience here. :)

For even longer version see description and comments on [1].

In a nutshell, if devs set the ‘allowNull’ property on an AttributeDefinition to ‘true’, the r-r-d output for the attribute has “nillable” => true. But there is no way to say “allowNull but only if an alternative is set.” So people are setting “allowNull” to true even if the attribute should be set in the absence of alternatives. And HAL has no metadata available to it to tell users they *must* set one of the alternatives. So I want to:

1) Add a setRequired(boolean) method to the AD builders where the fact that it means “must be defined if no alternative is defined” is explicitly declared
2) @Deprecate setAllowNull and point to setRequired
3) Clarify the meaning of setAllowNull(true) as being the same as setRequired(false)
4) Change the builder ‘allowNull’ constructor param name to “optional” and document its meaning as “allowing undefined values even in the absence of defined alternatives”.  I could call the param ‘notRequired’ which is clearer in meaning but odd.

Then I will add a new ‘required’ metadata field to the r-r-d output and change the impl of the existing ’nillable’ metadata to a logical “!required || (alternatives != null && alternatives.length > 0)”  

This will result in a change in the ‘nillable’ value for 4 attributes in the WildFly model from ‘false’ to ’true': 

/subsystem=transactions PROCESS_ID_SOCKET_BINDING and PROCESS_ID_UUID
/core-service=management/security-realm=*/authenticaton=ldap USERNAME_FILTER and ADVANCED_FILTER

The latter two are not exposed in the console so the issue really is the two transaction attributes.

I haven’t checked other subsystems in things like Teiid or JDG, but if there are only 4 in all of WildFly I doubt there are many.

Also, if people start using the new behavior to correct problems like [2] and [3] people may expect the console to understand and reflect the concept of “required but only if there is no alternative’.

[1] https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFCORE-1556
[2] https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-6608
[3] https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-6607

-- 
Brian Stansberry
Manager, Senior Principal Software Engineer
JBoss by Red Hat