Excessive use of Option

[cemoktra]

Hello,

i'm wondering if the Option type is used a bit too much. Looking at iam::model::User for example. All fields are optional, but shouldn't be at least the path be mandatory? Or even more fields? Is it possible to have no user_name? Just asking cause this results in a lot of .as_ref().unwrap().as_ref().unwrap() chaining in the end.

So the question is basically why ever type is an Option? No mandatory types at all?

[rcoh]

Note for the community: If this is important to you, please 👍🏻 this discussion to help us prioritize.

Hello! This is a great question. The short answer is that we hope that prior to GA we'll be able to make many of these optional fields required.

The longer answer is a bit more complicated. The underlying source of optionality stems from our need to make an SDK that is fully backwards compatible with future service updates. In the future, it's possible that fields that are always sent today may only be sent in certain cases, forcing the SDK to model them as optional from day 1.

However, we recognize that this isn't a great experience as a customer. We're working on different avenues to make fields that are truly permanently required permanently required so that the SDK can model them as T instead of Option<T>.

[alex-hunt-materialize]

Thanks for working on this. I understand that not everything that is always there today can be made T instead of Option<T>, but there are certainly some that will never be optional (can you really have a Tag that doesn't have either a key or value, or an EIP Address without an allocation_id?). Rusoto has this same problem, and is one of the more painful parts of using it.

At the very least, I would expect the ID of the resource created to always be present. Even just getting that one field non-optional would probably solve over half the use cases.

[allan2]

Just wanted to link smithy-rs #837 to this discussion.

It was discussed to use other language API References or the service API docs to find out which fields are required, i.e., can be made T.

[github-actions[bot]]

Hello! Reopening this discussion to make it searchable.