Kong: Tags should allow any string as a tag

[eamonnmcevoy]

Summary

I want to assign key values strings to my consumer tags but I get a schema violation error any time there are characters like =, :, |

Is there any way around this validation?

{
  "message": "schema violation (tags.1: invalid value: a=b)",
  "name": "schema violation",
  "fields": {
    "tags": [
      "invalid value: a=b"
    ]
  },
  "code": 2
}

https://discuss.konghq.com/t/change-the-validation-rules-on-tags/6971

As a work around I am encoding values in hex, but this is not ideal.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Add a conumer with tag k=v, k|v, etc
2. schema violation

Additional Details & Logs

• Kong version v2.1.2

[bungle]

There is some discussion about this in this PR:
https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/5451

[bungle]

In general there is no technical reason to allow more chars in tags. But as this has popped now at least twice or more, perhaps we should consider supporting more.

[bungle]

I am sure some people would love to use unicode powers of emoticons as labels too :-)

[eamonnmcevoy]

Is there a way to forward a consumers tags to the backend service? I was hoping to use the tags feature to provide additional metadata about a consumer.

[bungle]

Could you just create perhaps a profile plugin that creates profiles table that has UNIQUE consumer_id as a foreign key (in pg) to consumers table. We can certainly look how to enhance tags, but I feel like storing extra info about consumers is not a good use for tags. We could also perhaps think about adding meta column to consumers itself (e.g. a hash -> key -> value (string:string) field). But yes, these are just some thoughts of mine.

[fairyqb]

custom plugin

example:

function plugin:access(conf)
    plugin.super.access(self)

    local consumer = kong.client.get_consumer()
    kong.service.request.set_header("tag", serialize(consumer.tags))

end

[eamonnmcevoy]

I went for the custom plugin solution, thanks for the suggestion!