No way to set "indesiredstate" or "changedresources"

[mgreenegit]

Prerequisites

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• [X] Make sure you are able to repro it on the latest version
• [X] Search the existing issues.

Steps to reproduce

run dsc config test passing in config

Expected behavior

if the json output includes these properties at the root, dsc should assume the resource wants to set the value rather than comparing the results of desiredState and actualState. otherwise, there must be a contract for output schema.

Actual behavior

if these values are included in json, no change to output

Error details

No response

Environment data

7.3.9

Version

alpha4

Visuals

No response

[michaeltlombardi]

@mgreenegit, not sure I follow this issue - do you mean that if a resource instance defines _inDesiredState in the configuration, it should be checked directly somehow? Can you show a concrete example or help me understand better?

Right now the contract for test is that either:

1. The resource doesn't implement the test operation. dsc calls get for the resource and performs a synthetic comparison between the desired state in the configuration document and the actual state returned by the resource.
2. The resource implements test. dsc calls test for the resource and the resource returns a JSON object representing the actual state of the resource and the _inDesiredState property as true if the resource is in the desired state or false if it isn't. Optionally, the resource may also return the differing properties as an array. If the resource doesn't return the list of differing properties, DSC calculates it.

It's worth noting that _inDesiredState should only be a property for resources that implement test - and, when they do, the property must use the well-known schema implementation. The schema for _inDesiredState is:

{
  "type": ["boolean", "null"],
  "readOnly": true
}

It's a read-only property, it can't be sent to the resource, only returned by it. Contractually, it should only be returned as a boolean value for the test operation. For all other operations, it must be returned as null or not included in the output.