Dynamic References

The main feature of this release is a better support of dynamic references. So far dynamic reference expressions could only indirectly be implemented using the eval function using a composed string containing the final static reference expression. With this release a direct expression syntax is supported.

The following new features will be usable with this release

• dynamic reference expressions
  • simple dynamic reference components: foo.[name].bar
    Besides a number as index as before, now any expression could be used as index. Its value is used to
    address list elements as well as map fields.
  • dynamic multi component indices: foo.[list].bar
    If the index expression of an indexed reference expression evaluates to a list, the entries of the list are used as
    path components.
  • slice indices: foo.[1..3]
    if the index of an indexed reference expression evaluates to an index range, the reference expression
    evaluates to a slice of the basic array
• new functions
  • ipset provides a document structure independent way to determine ip sets based on dedicated
    preconfigured entries of a set of ip ranges. It can replace the functionality of static_ips in non-bosh-manifest
    documents
  • stub directly refers to elements in merge stubs.
  • element can be used to address elements in lists or maps.
  • compact deletes empty entries in a list
• Subtraction of IP addresses and IP constants in dynaml expressions
• New marker &local to indicate nodes to be deleted after processing a stub

Additionally some tricky bugs in the merge logic are fixed.

Maps and strings

Added some new string based functions:

• replace replace stub strings
• contains extended to check also for sub strings in addition to list entries
• index find first occurence of substring
• lastindex find last occurence

To support better creation of dynamic maps and map entries within user defined functions and mapping expressions
the function makemap has been added and dynaml syntax has been extended to support map literals. Map literals
allow to desribe both, keys and values with dynaml expressions.

e.g.:

k: name
a: age
age: 25
map: (( { k="alice", a=age } ))

provides a map

map:
  name: alice
  age: 25

Additionally the new boolean function valid can be used to check for defined expressions evaluating to non-null values.

Besides new functionality, some problems are fixed:

• lists containing merge entries were merged as index lists even if the entries contain key fields.
• lists containing expressions as value of key fields were not merged correctly. Now it is possible to
  use simple expressions here. There might still be combinations preventing the correct key evaluation prior to
  merging.

The world of undefined values.

The major feature of this release is to introduce a new literal for an undefined value (~~). It opens a rich set of possibilities for dealing with implicit and explicit configuration settings managed by different stubs.

Additionally, to round up this feature, a new function require has been added, that simplifies the handling of null values.

Ranges for `static_ips`

The builtin function static_ips now additionally accepts (deep) list arguments with integers as leafs.
This allows specifying ranges for large numbers of IPs instead of explicitly enumerating them.

for example:
static_ips([1..10])

Templates and Friends

Feature release focusing on the completion of the template functionality:

• template marker now supported for lists to define list templates
• template marker also available for single values
• fix handling of merges described in templates
• temporary marker to indicate intermediate helper nodes, which will be omited in final output
• improved error reporting by distinguishing subsequent errors from root errors
• using spiff in pipelines
• regular expression matches
• functions uniq and contains
• transforming lists to maps to support generation of maps with arbitrary keys
• aggregation support looping over lists and maps to aggregate entries to a single result
• various fixes

Complete documentation can be found here

First fork release for spiff introducing spiff++

This release adds some new core functionality to spiff, templates and lambda expressions. Please have a look at the documentation.