1385714 - Modify actions schema to be completely specified

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Taskcluster :: Services, enhancement)

Description

[Hassan Ali (:hassan)]

When trying to build a form from a json-schema, some fields are not showing up. It turns out if an action schema has an object type without a "properties" property set, then it's hard to visualize it.

Example test-retrigger-action.py L60-65 [1]:

{
 `environment`: {
    'type': object,
    'default': {'MOZ_LOG': ''},
    'title': 'Extra environment variables',
    'description': 'Extra environment variables to use for this run'
  } 
}


I am suggesting that this schema is changed to something like that:

{
  'environments: {
    'type': 'array',
    'title': 'Extra environment variables',
    'items': {
      'type': 'object',
      'properties': {
        'key': {
          'type': 'string',
          'default': 'MOZ_CONFIG'
        },
        'value': {
          'type': 'string',
          'default': ''
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For the example above, I am wrapping it with an array type to allow users to add as many environment variables (key-value pairs) as they wish.

This change will need to be applied to every schema that doesn't have a "properties" key.


As a result, Bug 1385467 will behave accordingly.

[1] http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/taskcluster/actions/test-retrigger-action.py#60-65

Comment 1

[Dustin J. Mitchell [:dustin] (he/him)]

Jonas, what do you think?  I feel like this is sort of limiting, as it will require some munging to get the array-of-objects form converted to an object of env vars..

Comment 2

[Jonas Finnemann Jensen (:jonasfj)]

I think the original should have been:
{
 'environment': {
    'type': object,
    'default': {'MOZ_LOG': ''},
    'title': 'Extra environment variables',
    'description': 'Extra environment variables to use for this run',
    'additionalProperties': {'type': 'string'}                             // <--- missed this part
  } 
}

---

I know bstack have mixed feelings about tweaking schemas to the whim of the ui-library used in some-tool.

On the other hand I'm sure we'll find certain patterns that works really well, and just use those,
ideally with UI generation falling back to a plain JSON editor if it can't figure out the schema.


Note: In general, it's true that array of object is often better, since you can add additional properties
      to the objects... You can't do that if you are using an object to create a map.

Comment 3

[Brian Stack [:bstack]]

Attachment: Bug 1385714 - Improve validation of action tasks

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/163662/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/163662/

Comment 4

[Brian Stack [:bstack]]

Not going to do this right now as it turns out that it's quite difficult to specify a meta-schema for action tasks that is general enough to accept what we want while being specific enough to disallow what we don't want.