Acting as as a parameter

[sashaCher]

ActingAs property has a branch of problem

• It's not thread safe, separated threads can't use different ActingAs context
• ActingAs is a parameter of only 8 Conjur REST APIs from more then 40 so it is not obvious from SDK which APIs are affected from the property and which aren't
• If there are two separated code areas that use the same client instance they always need to check and to overwrite ActingAs value before relevant calls (but which calls are relevant is not obvious, as I mentioned)

[sashaCher]

@dividedmind

1. According to this https://conjur.docs.apiary.io/ reference there are only 8 API those accept acting_as parameter. All those APIs accept the parameter as a part of query section of URL. Is this behavior the same for all APIs mentioned in reference? Where I can find more detailed version of Conjur v4 REST API reference?

2. For implementing it according to your proposal we need to do one those things:

• To remove timer from token refresh mechanism

• To implement IDisposable for client and to count references to its ApiKeyAuthenticator in order to dispose also it with inner timer

In current implementation not Client nor ApiKeyAuthenticator will have never collected by GC because Timer object holds them from inside. In some use cases it may lead to memory leak.

[dividedmind]

1. I'm not sure, frankly I just checked the source and acting_as is handled on the application level :) I guess it's only really useful for some calls and that's why it's documented like that.
2. Ah, you're right about the leak, good catch! Another solution for it would be to have the timer hold a weak reference to the authenticator. However I'm pretty sure the Client would still get GCed; the authenticator doesn't hold any reference to it (that I can see, please correct me if I'm wrong). Since the authenticator is shared between the instances the leak is therefore limited and happens independently of how ActingAs is implemented — in particular to the same extent with the current code.