[chef] Re: Why databag ids are that restricted?

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 4:10 AM, Roberto C. Morano wrote:

> Hello,
>  
> I'm working in a project to manage desktop computers configurations with  
> Chef and we are using databags to host users' specific configurations.
>  
> At the very begining, databags seemed the correct and easy place to hold  
> these confs, but we found that we will have problems with users, for  
> example, using dots in their usernames, because databag ids do not  
> support this.
>  
> I've been hacking around Chef code trying (I haven't been able to yet)  
> to make it to support it, but I wanted to know the original reason for  
> this restriction.
>  
> Could any Chef developer tell me why is this restriction applied exactly?
>  
> Thank you in advance.
The restrictions are there just to ensure that we don't have any gotchas when 
using the IDs in URLs, either with the Chef Server, or with CouchDB's HTTP 
API. In this case, I think everything will be fine if we relax the 
restriction.

The code is here:

https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/chef/lib/chef/data_bag_item.rb#L41

Looking at the router code for the API server, it *should* support this okay:

https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/chef-server-api/config/router.rb

Though I'm a bit concerned that magic content type selection could be an 
issue, for example if you had a data bag item with the ID "foo.xml", It's 
possible that your request would be interpreted as a request for an XML 
response. If that is the case, there's probably a workaround.

--  
Dan DeLeo  
>  
> --  
> Roberto C. Morano
> Área de Proyectos
>  
> Emergya Consultoría.
> Tlf: +34 954 51 75 77
> Fax: +34 954 51 64 73
> http://www.emergya.es