Connections do not save since Airflow 2.1.0

Apache Airflow version: Various - between 2.0.2 and 2.1.2

Kubernetes version (if you are using kubernetes) (use kubectl version): n.a.

Environment:

• Docker running on Win 10 or Ubuntu 18.04 or Ubuntu 20.04 using the images
  • apache/airflow:2.0.2-python3.8
  • apache/airflow:2.1.0-python3.8
  • apache/airflow:2.1.1-python3.8
  • apache/airflow:2.1.2-python3.8

What happened:

Since Airflow 2.1.0, saving or changing connections using the UI does not work anymore. When creating a new connection or attempting to change an existing one, the click on the Save button does not do anything.

Step 1: Go the create connection page and fill out the form

Step 2: Click on `Save`. For a very short amount of time (milliseconds), the UI changes to one that seems to show `all` custom connection type extra fields (see next screenshot), and then reverts back to the previous layout, without any message or saving anything. Effectively, it is not possible to change existing or create new connections using the UI.

What you expected to happen:

I'd like to see this screen again

How to reproduce it:

It seems to me that if this was behavior was the case for everyone, this would have been picked up already. Likely, this is related to the fact that I am maintaining a provider package (ewah). Simply changing the base image to the Airflow 2.0.2 version makes it work as expected, and any version since 2.1.0 show this bug. I’m not sure how to best reproduce this other than using the ewah repository, building it locally and switching the image between those version, as I am doing.

Anything else we need to know:

There are a lot of custom connections in this package. While writing this issue down, I had the idea to check if I accidentally called two extra fields the same by copy pasting them, and that this may break something since 2.1.0. I’ll update this issue if I find something along those lines; either way, if that was the case, I’d prefer it to throw an error rather than have a hard to debug issue.

UPDATE: Negative, I went through all custom connections and found nothing of concern.

[potiuk]

I think it’s a bit how the SelectField is validated in javascript which is run while submitting the form. From what I saw, there were some client-side pre-validation failures generated by FAB client-side. I do not know that much about it to dig into it (and taking into account future of Airlfow WebUI, it is probably not worth it) 😃. The check I’ve done on the server side will prevent from similar problems for others (With VERY explicit WARNING message and failing to load custom connection), so I think it’s good as it is 😃.

[soltanianalytics]

Very interesting, thank you for the support!

unless you would like to invest a little time and add support for it for example

What would be needed for that? Where should I start / where to look into?

I’ll probably phase them out for now, though, thanks!