Flavor ID does not have to be an int (and is optional when creating)

[Russell Cloran]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1043410 changes the flavor creation API to make flavor optional; flavorids are now generated as UUIDs.

There is also no validation for the input type in any case.

Creation seems to be, therefore, unnecessarily restrictive of the user, and listing/getting seems not to be permissive enough of the server's response.

[Russell Cloran (russell)]

It seems that https://review.openstack.org/#/c/14999/ partly addresses this (I can't see a related bug).

[Russell Cloran (russell)]

It seems that change fully addresses this bug

[Alexey Izbyshev (izbyshev)]

That change completely removed type checking of 'flavorid' argument of FlavorManager.create(). It has already lead to problems because a caller can pass any (even unencodable with JSONEncoder) object as flavorid and get a strange exception instead of usual CommandError. Horizon currenly does exactly that thing -- it passes an UUID (an object, not a string) to api.nova.flavor_create() and gets a TypeError from json module.

While it is an obvious bug in Horizon, it would be good if novaclient does type checking of 'flavorid`. It is currenly stored as `varchar` in nova database, so it would be logical to check that `flavorid` is a string or None (in the latter case it should be auto-generated by nova). I would like to see opinions from more experienced people on this case, in particular, whether such a strict check is acceptable in sense of compatibility (earlier novaclient has accepted an int, and now it effectively accepts any json-encodable type).

Other alternatives are:
  - to check that flavorid is json-encodable
  - to explicitly convert it to string (if it is not None) and thus ensure json-encodability
  - to remove flavorid from arguments as it's done in other `create` functions (it should be generated and returned by nova)

[Anita Kuno (anteaya)]

Based on a conversation with vishy in IRC I am asked to close this bug.