Need a mechanism to look up a workspace's ID by name

[ChrisStrykesAgain]

I don't know I've ever known the id of a workspace a priori, and it's required for EVERY API. In almost every case, I just know the name of the workspace and end up having to write a direct call to the /auth route and figure it out myself. I'd like to add this functionality to this set of clients.

I haven't dug too deeply yet, so I'm not sure where it would be the best fit, but I'm happy for suggestions if someone has an immediate, strong preference.

[rbell517]

I agree with this being a problem and there is good value in solving it. I would certainly prefer the actual API take workspace names as freely as workspace IDs but that could be a big lift to implement in every service.

The most user friendly solution allowing the various client's workspace field to take in a workspace and determine if it exists as a workspace name on their /auth result then swap it out before making the real request. This would be an extra request to /auth you'd have to do at least once, so we might want to make it opt-in. Proper workspace IDs are GUIDs so we could also defer the /auth request unless a non-guid is provided.

The straight forward approach would be to make the public client function a wrapper of a private function that has the actual uplink decorator, similar to what we do when we need to transform other parameters like query_assets. A version of this for create_assets would look something like this:

    @post("assets", args=[Field("assets")])
    def __create_assets(
        self, assets: List[models.CreateAssetRequest]
    ) -> models.CreateAssetsPartialSuccessResponse:
        ...


    def create_assets(
        self, assets: List[models.CreateAssetRequest]
    ) -> models.CreateAssetsPartialSuccessResponse:
        """
        ...
        """
        if (this._needs_workspace_substitution(assets)):
            auth_result = this._auth()
            new_assets = list(map(lambda asset: this._substitute_workspace(asset, auth_result), assets))
            return this.__create_assets(new_assets)
        
        return this.__create_assets(assets)

This code is going to be almost identical for each client that wants this, which makes this a good case for a decorator. We could modify the existing post decorator for this, adding a substitute_workspace_names parameter. Or a separate @substitute_workspace_name decorator might be cleaner separation of concerns.

I'd also consider adding a WithWorkspace common model similar to what we have in WithPaging. That would allow common code to quickly identify whether the model has a workspace field that could be substituted, and would also be a place to add Pydantic validation that the workspace is a name or an ID. Or even a common place to define both workspace and workspace_name fields in one model if we didn't want to try to infer. Unfortunately workspace is optional on some APIs and required on others so we would probably need a WithWorkspace and WithRequiredWorkspace or similar.

Its important to note that doing a workspace substitution is trickier for the query filter string parameters. Some services already support a WorkspaceName filterable field but not all. Doing a flat string find-replace in the filter string sounds error prone. Is this part of what you're trying to solve?

[santhoshramaraj]

@ChrisStrykesAgain #76 intended to add this feature through the utility and API endpoint.