[db] Make hand-written transformers more robust against odd DB values

[geropl]

Description

Make hand-written transformers more robust against odd DB values

Related Issue(s)

Fixes #6642

How to test

1. Add an entry to d_b_workspace_cluster and set admissionPreferences/admissionConstraints to odd values like: [, ] or NULL
   1. one terminal: kubectl port-forward mysl-0 3306
   2. another terminal: mysql -u gitpod -h 127.0.0.1 -p
   3. insert: INSERT INTO d_b_workspace_cluster SET name = "test", url = "https://example.dev", state = "available", score = 100, maxScore = 100, govern = TRUE, tls = "{", admissionConstraints = "[", admissionPreferences = "]";
2. see that ws-manager-bridge logs errors (and failing re-tries), but you're still able to start a workspace
   1. grep for: error parsing value ws-cluster from DB

Release Notes

make DB layer more robust against odd DB values

Documentation

[jankeromnes]

1. Add an entry to d_b_workspace_cluster and set admissionPreferences/admissionConstraints to odd values like: [, ] or NULL

Sorry, I may have taken this a bit too far 😅

mysql> insert into d_b_workspace_cluster (name, url, tls, state, score, maxScore, govern, admissionConstraints, admissionPreferences) values ('hyper2', 'https://gitpod-staging.com', '-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n1234', 'available', 100, 100, 1, '"YOLO"', "3.1415926535");

No longer able to start workspaces:

But I guess this is not what you had in mind right?

[jankeromnes]

Interesting. Why was it necessary to make this explicit?

[geropl]

Why was it necessary to make this explicit?

Not necessary (empty functions return undefined), did not even notice making this change. Just pleasing my sense of order I guess. 😉

[JanKoehnlein]

Why wouldn't we harden and re-use Transformer#Simple_JSON? Unless there is something very specific about these cases, re-use seems to be the less error-prone fix to me here.

[geropl]

@JanKoehnlein The error here actually was triggered in simple-json, not our code. 🙂 Also, we have some requirements ("" | NULL => undefined) that is does not handle.

[geropl]

@jankeromnes That's an interesting case, albeit a different one: Injecting valid JSON of a different type.

IMO we should not take it too far here. The root cause here is that Transformer.simpleJSON does not handle unvalid values (NULL) well, and we experienced one outage for bc of this.

[JanKoehnlein]

/lgtm

[roboquat]

LGTM label has been added.

Git tree hash: 6156820224663b5063c160d9a221963e16ba2824

[roboquat]

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is APPROVED

This pull-request has been approved by: JanKoehnlein

Associated issue: #6642

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