Terraform-provider-aws: Split docs for Data Sources / Resources

[hashibot[bot]]

_This issue was originally opened by @jhmartin as hashicorp/terraform#18530. It was migrated here as a result of the provider split. The original body of the issue is below._

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Please split the documentation for data sources and providers, as it is cumbersome (particularly for AWS) to Ctrl-F through to find the correct object. Many of the core objects appear as both a data source and provider.

[bflad]

Hi @jhmartin 👋 , thanks for writing this in. We certainly do have a very large amount of data sources and resources in the provider, which does make the documentation cumbersome to navigate.

As alluded to before this issue was migrated, we do have some longer term ideas that will apply to the provider space as a whole and likely improve the navigation along the way. We also have some ideas around merging together the concepts of resources (single object) and data sources (single and multiple object). Unfortunately, any of the benefits from those ideas (if they are implemented) will be on the magnitude of months or longer away.

In the short term though:

• We could split the Data Sources sidebar section by AWS service similar to the Resources sidebar section as we now have over 100 data sources
• We may be able to collapse the sidebar headers based on resource type that is currently open (data source versus resource) and/or AWS service (e.g. EC2 Resources). I have not personally looked if our provider documentation setup can support this at the moment.
• We should probably prepend Resource: to all the title heading for resources, similar to how we prepended Data Source: to all the title headings for data sources

I cannot provide any sort of timeline as the Terraform team at HashiCorp won't be able to work on this in the near future due to our focus being elsewhere, but we'd be happy to review ideas/feedback on this topic in the meantime. Alternatively, if others would also like to see this implemented I'd encourage adding a :+1: upvote reaction to the original issue comment (not to this comment), which we use as one of the inputs to prioritize work for the Terraform team.

[dbogen]

A reorganization of the AWS provider documentation is desperately needed. The list of data sources on the left side of the page is now longer than the content for some items on the right. This leads to a page that is basically a huge amount of whitespace on the right and a single very long column of links on the left.

Could data sources be put on one page and resources on another at a minimum?

[PaulGrimshaw]

Agreed, this is driving me nuts.

A proper collapsible menu would be great, so first you just see datasources / providers, and expand progressively to get to the topics you want.

[JamesUoM]

Agreed, this is driving me nuts.

A proper collapsible menu would be great, so first you just see datasources / providers, and expand progressively to get to the topics you want.

Yep I spend more time scrolling and accidentally reading data sources than reading the resource docs that I want.

[jhmartin]

Something I noticed is that the urls for datasources have /d/ while resources are /r/, so if I land on the wrong one I can replace the url character and skip to the correct location.

[bflad]

Hello everyone 👋 You may have noticed some recent changes to the provider documentation lately. If you browse to the Terraform AWS Provider documentation, we have collapsed the navigation headers and now you'll notice a new navigation filtering option that can be clicked or activated with /. For example:

Hopefully this helps make the website more usable! We are likely to also break up the large Data Sources section so the individual data sources fall under their respective AWS services in #8225.

If you have further comments or proposals, please feel free to create a new GitHub issue and we'll be happy to take a look. Happy Terraform'ing! 🚀

[hashibot[bot]]

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