Why does --base-profile work as a command option but not as a profile property?

[adam-wolfe]

The --base-profile option is available for most (if not all) Zowe CLI commands. This option is useful for the zowe auth login apiml command to pick a base profile to use for authenticating to the API ML, and can also be used for other commands to specify a base profile to use (for example, you could have a single z/OSMF profile and several base profiles and you could specify a --base-profile to select which host (defined in your base profiles) to connect to).

However, if I specify baseProfile as a profile property in a z/OSMF profile, this property seems to be ignored when running Zowe CLI commands. Strangely, if I issue a command with the --show-inputs-only flag, I see base-profile listed under commandValues that looks the same if I specify the --base-profile option or specify the property in my z/OSMF profile, but, functionally, this value is ignored if it is specified as a profile property.

To summarize my question: Why is the baseProfile profile property ignored while the --base-profile option works? Is that by design and/or is this something that should be changed?

[awharn]

This is because of how we load arguments. See prepare in CommandProcessor here.

Effectively, we load environment variables first, and check for profile arguments there. We then build out all of the arguments from the command line, then the loaded config, the finally build out the arguments from default values.

The problem with this is that all of the options from the config are loaded in CliUtils.getOptValuesFromConfig here, which loads each profile one at a time. If the base profile is the first profile that is loaded, it will load all of the options from the base profile, then all of the options from the zOSMF profile, which specifies a new base profile to use. However, the base profile is already loaded at that point.

It may be possible in the CommandProcessor to add another function call and check each profile it is about to use specifically for [profile-type]-profile properties, evaluate if they cause a circular reference (or attempts to load two different profiles of the same type), and then load the profiles one at a time, combining their arguments. This, however, would only work for Zowe CLI, and would need a different implementation on Zowe Explorer.

[adam-wolfe]

Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.