Allocate using subnets params gives unhelpful errors

[Martin Packman]

Calling `machines allocate` with 'subnets' or 'not_subnets' params, or for MAAS 1.9 calling 'nodes acquire' with 'networks' or 'not_networks' params, unhelpfully only ever returns the same error:

$ maas env21 machines allocate subnets=bogus verbose=true dry_run=true
{"subnets": ["No matching subnets found."]}

This means slight mistakes in the under-documented mini-language give no feedback as to what is actually wrong.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

I think this is a more widespread problem:

roaksoax@unleashed:~/Desktop/project/maas$ maas admin vlans create names=1
Not Found

'names' doesn't exist

[Mike Pontillo (mpontillo)]

Yeah. The "mini-language" (which we call 'specifiers') is under-documented (and not as robust as I would like, and doesn't cover all objects in MAAS) because it was developed rapidly in order to meet the requirements for the 'interfaces' constraint.

I do think we should make it more robust and more available to all applicable APIs. But this is more a wishlist for a future release than a bug fix, in my mind.

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

This bug has not seen any activity in the last 6 months, so it is being automatically closed.

If you are still experiencing this issue, please feel free to re-open.

MAAS Team