is there any pattern in actions-typing or github-workflows-kt for modelling this kind of structured ...

# github-workflows-kt

[Nikky]

is there any pattern in actions-typing or github-workflows-kt for modelling this kind of structured input?
i would like to write builders that assemble this list of values with type safety ideally
but … i see no way to neatly integrate that and scope it to just this action type..

[Piotr Krzemiński]

no, it’s not supported. All you can do for now is to build your little side DSL and ask people to use it when building tags

[Piotr Krzemiński]

it would map to a list of pairs or a list of maps right?

[Nikky]

but how can i turn

tags = listOf(...)

into eg.

tags = buildTags {}

without this polluting the namespace ?

and if i were to contribute such helper functions… how can they be made discoverable ?

[Piotr Krzemiński]

without this polluting the namespace ?

I don’t have a solution for it now, sorry

[Piotr Krzemiński]

generally so far I decided to not complicate the typings too much because the interest in adopting whatever already exists is pretty low

[Piotr Krzemiński]

so I’m on pause with developing this

[Piotr Krzemiński]

feel free to create a feature request in the DSL lib to be able to somehow provide type-safe builders for some inputs. The fact that we don’t know how to implement it doesn’t mean that the idea is wrong 🙂

[Nikky]

okay, i will spend some time prototyping solutions
my goals are to allow alternatives to tag = listOf<String>() but… not break the contract of required arguments… that would not increase typesafety

[Piotr Krzemiński]

we had a similar discussion with @Vampire related to passing something more type-safe to inputs, but in a context of what expressions can return. This problem seems to be a piece in a bigger puzzle. Denotable union types would be an elegant way of addressing both, for your problem we could have something like List<String> <or> SomeTypeSafeMarkerInterface, and the IDE could help discover functions that return the latter