Find And Replace in yml files

[dayagz]

OpenRewrite YAML recipes currently do not support find and replace operations. The text-based find and replace modifies the structure, which prevents subsequent recipes from being applied. Could we consider adding a find and replace recipe?

[shanman190]

Find and replace is conceptually an activity applied to textual source. When using the org.openrewrite.text.FindAndReplace, it converts the current source file to its textual form and then applies the recipe over it. As a result, the original LST model is lost and instead a PlainText LST element is returned in its place.

Using find and replace in a declarative YAML recipe will work, but it's a very common mistake that users run into when they then try to then compose language aware recipes after the find and replace operation occurred. So often a mistake that it's documented explicitly that language specific operations should be applied first and then find and replace applied at the very end. You can see that documented here: https://docs.openrewrite.org/recipes/text/findandreplace

[knutwannheden]

It appears to me that if we were to offer a parsing service (e.g. by pulling up the JavaSourceFile#service() to SourceFile), then a language that supports "reparse" could allow recipes like FindAndReplace to "rehydrate" an LST from text. Parsers like Java won't be able to support this for the foreseeable future, due to the type attribution, but for YAML this should not be an issue.

Maybe @timtebeek has seen similar requests or applications.

[shanman190]

@knutwannheden, that's fair. Assuming "reparsing" is what's being asked for that would probably be limited to just hcl, json, properties, and yaml. As all of the others have type attribution or other complex scenarios.

[knutwannheden]

Correct. And XML (except for Maven pom.xml files of course, unless losing the MavenResolutionResult marker is considered acceptable).

Possibly I am just looking for a good excuse to pull up that service() method 😅

[dayagz]

That would be a nice feature to add, as these config files often require a value to be replaced first and then continue with language-specific operations, such as removing an empty key that results from the replace operation. The ability to rehydrate the LST after a find and replace would solve this issue and allow for a seamless workflow where modifications to the text are followed by structural changes.

[knutwannheden]

@dayagz Do you not know what mapping needs replacing in your YAML? If you can't use ChangePropertyValue you could also implement a custom recipe that replaces any scalar value matching a given substring or pattern.