Misleading parameter PartitionKey in methods ReadItemStreamAsync and ReadItemAsync?

Hi there,

ReadItemStreamAsync and ReadItemAsync both expect a parameter PartitionKey partitionKey.

It requires to provide the value of the partition key, not the name of the the partition key.

I find this confusing because e.g. on the storage explorer and data explorer the term partionkey refers to the name of the key and not the value.

Maybe the name of the parameter can be adjusted to reflect that it is the value that should be passed in.

What is more, why do I have to create a partionkey object in the first place? Wouldn’t it be easier to pass a string as parameter for the partitionkeyvalue and create the object internally?

[j82w]

In the v3 SDK it is required to always provide a partition key path. In v2 it is optional. The problem is that people where creating non-partitioned containers. Their apps and data would grow to the point that it would hit the cap. Once a container is created the partition key path can not be changed. This requires users to create a new partitioned container, and migrate all the data. This is a very painful process. To avoid this scenario all the new SDKs always make the container partitioned. The PartitionKey.None is used to allow access in the older non-partitioned containers.

If you are sure that your data will not need to scale you could define a new field like ‘/pk’ as the partition key path. Then just have it always hard coded to string.Empty. That way you know that read will always be partition key value of string.empty. Then in the future if you find you do need to scale you can start populating that field with a real partition key value.

[bartelink]

Just Explicit is better than Implicit rule in general. For important stuff like the partition key spec, Making Me Think a little bit is a good thing. i.e. being forced to write new PartionKeyValue(key) versus some magic doing that for me means (in this strawman example) a) extra allocations b) I dont recognize that this might be something I want to have a strong type for c) I don’t get to see that PartionKeyValue can also be constructed with an int

Implicit operators for me need to be a) really high traffic b) really improve readability for common cases. I think XLinq uses them and was a good design (perhaps someone who has dealt with feedback 2 years down the road might disagree)