Automated validation that the Portal UI outputs map to deployment template parameter inputs

[glennmusa]

Benefit/Result/Outcome

So that as new changes enter mlz.bicep we have some idea if the Azure Portal form will still work.

More importantly, so that if any proposed changes to mlz.bicep would break the Azure Portal form, we know right away to prevent the form from breaking in /main and get feedback on how to update the form.

Description

The ARM TTK has unit tests for CreateUIDefinition files. This seems like a good place to start. The ARM TTK does not support Declarative Forms.

Acceptance Criteria

• On a PR, check to see that the Portal UI is compatible with the compiled Bicep deployment template
• check that all required parameters in the deployment template have a matching named output in the Portal UI template
• check that the Portal UI template outputs contain only named values that are available parameters in the deployment template

[glennmusa]

The ARM TTK comes out of the box with test support for createUiDefinition.json Portal UI templates, but not the Declarative Form json templates that MLZ uses.

Will research what kind of testing support is available to Full Screen Create templates.

The guidance from the Declarative Form team is to write an end-to-end test that targets a self-hosted portal pane that you can serve via the Azure Portal CLI ap serve command by providing your Declarative Form (e.g. src/bicep/form/mlz.portal.json) and the target deployment template (e.g. src/bicep/mlz.json) to execute a deployment.

That's certainly a desired end state, but, it does require an machine/agent configuration to run the ap CLI, source packages from an internal NuGet feed, and presumably some automation to ready/clean subscriptions.

In the meantime, we will probably get value out of some simple checks that answer:

• does the form output values for all of the deployment templates' required parameters?

  • for all mlz.json parameters objects that do not have a defaultValue property, does the mlz.portal.json view.outputs.parameters object specify a key/value pair for that parameter?

• does the form output only valid parameters to the deployment template?

  • for all mlz.portal.json view.outputs.parameters key/value pairs, is there a matching named object in the mlz.json parameters objects?

[glennmusa]

Implementation started at glenn/declarativeFormValidation