"Implementing a more complex Read" session in "Writing Custom Providers" mentions closed issue

[splashx]

The guide mentions:

Due to the limitation of tf-11115 it is not possible to nest maps.

But tf-11115 has been closed - so it's not clear if the limitation still exists.

[wwboynton]

Glad to see someone else has acknowledged this before me. Hey @apparentlymart, it seems like @pdecat initially made a PR from a fork to resolve this but then closed it without merging, based on the assertion that "cleaning that part is more complex than that."

Within the next few days or weeks I will probably have to write a provider, so I guess I can try nesting some maps and see what happens, but in the meantime it would probably be good to get some eyes on this since it seems like the documentation might be leading new contributors to believe that they must work around a limitation which has been resolved for more than a year.

[apparentlymart]

Hi all,

Terraform Core v0.12 and later supports maps of any type, but the current Terraform SDK still speaks the old protocol (via a translation layer) and so this limitation is still present from a provider development standpoint.

I don't see an issue directly about nested maps but the plugin SDK repository already has some issues about exposing the new Terraform v0.12 type system to providers and so I expect in the end this category of limitations would all be resolved together:

• Add support for maps with non-primitive types (rich / object map support) terraform-plugin-sdk#62
• Add support for resource schema properties with nested structures terraform-plugin-sdk#155

The "Writing Custom Providers" section is architecturally attached to the SDK, legacy repository organization details aside, so I expect opening issues about the provider development documentation in the SDK repository will make them more visible to the folks who would be primarily responsible for addressing them.

[laurapacilio]

The Writing Custom Providers tutorial has since been revamped on HashiCorp Learn, and I believe this is no longer an issue, so I'm going to close. Thanks for flagging!