Openwhisk: Support Default Parameters for Sequences

[jthomas]

Environment details:

IBM-Bluemix (US-South)

Steps to reproduce the issue:

 wsk action create test --sequence /whisk.system/combinators/trycatch  -p '$tryName' foo -p '$catchName' bar

Provide the expected results and outputs:

Looking at wsk action get test I can see that the parameters passed during the creation are ignored.

Digging into the code, I can see this snippet which looks like the culprit.
https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk/blob/10c182b26427e61db23a4a829fa5739dd6387c5a/core/controller/src/main/scala/whisk/core/controller/Actions.scala#L354-L362

Additional information you deem important:

Being able to store default parameters for a sequence action provides a convenient way to define new actions from the combinator actions without having to pass in the parameters each time or bind them into a separate package for each instance.

[rabbah]

This is related to #116 and is disabled intentionally. When @ioana-blue promoted sequences to first class actions, we kept the previous behavior (no parameters allowed) until we migrate all sequences that might exist in the db to the new schema. At which point we can enable this feature.

Until then the work around is to create a package binding with parameters and sequence that instead.

[cfjedimaster]

What is the latest on this? I just ran into it months later. :)

[cfjedimaster]

And if the decision is to NOT allow this for a while longer, the CLI should throw an error and not silently fail.

[cfjedimaster]

I hate to do a "nag comment" like this, but as I forgot this, again, and ran into this, again, I just want to bring this up again. Please please please make the CLI throw an error until the root issue is fixed.

[mhaack]

@jthomas, @rabbah any update on that? We ran into this as well. The work around to use a package binding with parameters does not really for us, since we have an action which we re-use in different sequences with different default parameter values. That would require multiple bindings then.

[rabbah]

help wanted :)

[abhupadh]

@jthomas @rabbah Is there any update on this support for default params for an OpenWhisk sequence. My use case is that I am setting a client_secret as default param to a sequence whose first action is a validate_action that validates the event signature using the client secret and then goes to next business logic action. However, the validate_action is seeing that default param value as undefined. Any suggestion would be really helpful as this seems blocking for us.

Thanks!