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Using bool parameter values not intuitive #94
Description
This does not behave as expected because the value is the string literal"true", not the boolean value true. This should be made more intuitive, or throw a warning?
data "coder_parameter" "ai" {
name = "ai"
display_name = "Use AI?"
description = "Do you want to use AI for this workspace?"
type = "bool"
form_type = "checkbox"
default = false
order = 0
}
data "coder_parameter" "ai_prompt" {
count = data.coder_parameter.ai.value == true ? 1 : 0
name = "prompt"
display_name = "Prompt"
description = ""
type = "string"
form_type = "textarea"
default = ""
styling = jsonencode({
placeholder = "hello world"
})
}
Activity
[-]Using `bool` parameters not intuitive[/-][+]Using `bool` parameter values not intuitive[/+]bpmct commentedon Apr 22, 2025
I imagine many folks will run into this confusion. Huge fan of some form of warning or "magic" handling
angrycub commentedon Aug 4, 2025
While it might be surprising that the type isn't plumbed through the datasource (my assumption here is that we can't produce a constant schema in the provider and are leaning on maps to carry the values), The big trick is to not test for equality. If the line was
Terraform should do automatic type conversion, converting it into a boolean on the fly. However, it will specifically not do it in the equality case.
Ref: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/expressions/types#type-conversion
It's a bit of an anti-pattern to explicitly test values against bool constants because TF lets you flex a bit with automatic type conversion. That said, I'm with y'all; folks are going to run into this just because some of the nuances of Terraform aren't super obvious.