Cannot patch keys that contain ~ or /

[Brad Morgan]

Object attributes with keys that contain '~' or '/' cannot be operated on via the API.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6901#section-3 defines a method for escaping these characters, and this is already implemented in the python jsonpatch lib that is used, so it seems this is simply a matter of relaxing the validation regex for the 'path' attribute. (Assuming, of course, Ironic wants to support keys with the characters in them at all)

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/343911

[Brad Morgan (morgabra)]

Couple followups:

1) Does Ironic even want to support these characters in attribute keys? If no, this can be closed.

2) The tests here are probably unwanted, as they really just test the jsonpatch lib, but I left them in so you could see the use case that this fixes.

3) This is sort of a poor user experience if someone manages to get anything in the DB with these characters, even if this patch merges. (You'll need to know the magic '~0', '~1' to escape them.) What can we do about that?

[Mathieu Mitchell (mat128)]

API-ref docs mention "The BODY of the PATCH request must be a JSON PATCH document, adhering to RFC 6902." and indeed, RFC 6902 mentions methods for escaping ~ and /.

[Jim Rollenhagen (jim-rollenhagen)]

Was asked to confirm that, yes, this is a real-world use case (we have keys with / in them downstream).

[Ruby Loo (rloo)]

We discussed in today's weekly ironic meeting [1], and there were no objections to supporting this. And apparently, there are folks that do have keys with '/' in them :)

[1] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/ironic/2016/ironic.2016-09-19-17.00.log.html, starting at 17:24:33 if you can figure out the thread;)

[Vladyslav Drok (vdrok)]

This has not been updated for 1.5 years. setting it back to triaged