way to distinguish optional parameters?

[kanreisa]

Hi,

I'm using "Deploy to Azure button" to my this project (reichat). and I added azuredeploy.json to get initial parameters.

result:

problems:

• users can't understand which are optional parameters.
• ARM Template can't specify that parameter is optional?

solutions: (proposal)

• add the magic prefix or suffix word to parameter name (Is there already?)
• just empty defaultValue to optional? (added from comment)
  • maybe it's not necessarily optional. And vice versa.
• update schema...

expected:

(Heroku)

Thanks,

[davidebbo]

Not sure I completely follow. I see in your template that all parameters are optional. But from what I can see, the Deploy UI is correctly filling up all the boxes with the default values from your template, such that you can directly press Next. If a parameter was not optional, it wouldn't let you go to the next step.

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem?

[kanreisa]

@davidebbo It is a problem that it is difficult to understand visually. see expected, that is displaying "(optional)"

[kanreisa]

FYI: https://github.com/kanreisa/reichat/blob/master/app.json#L21 (app.json / for Heroku)

[ehamai]

I just spoke to David about this and I think we agree that this is a good idea. It looks like you've already discovered that "optional" parameters in ARM templates means an empty default value. So if we see that situation, we could tell the user that they don't need to fill it in.

[ehamai]

Woops. Accidentally closed the issue.

[kanreisa]

@Tuesdaysgreen thank you. I'm waiting for improvement!

[kanreisa]

:+1: