Limiting operators in a workspace with a setting called strict mode

[Datron]

Preface

Limit the operators used to define contexts to only ==, making the resolution of overrides and experiments unabigious and not dependent on the time the override was created. This also enables some performance improvements in the resolution of context aware configs.

Why do this

Take an example

[city == london]
price = 10
units = pounds

[city IN [london, paris, delhi]]
price = 7.5
units = dollars

In the above cac defined, what will be the result for the query city = london?
Since cac resolves contexts by their weight and last_modified, the contexts in the example above are non-deterministic and can resolve to different configs based on which one was edited last. Imagine how much worse it will be when you have hundreds of contexts defined that overlap in this way.

Solution

Introduce a workspace config called strict mode. If this is enabled, overrides can be created only with contexts that use the operator == or is as we call from our frontend.

Exception

For the dimension variantIds, we will allow operators == and has to enable functionality we have defined in our experimentation clients which allow a entity to fall into multiple variants of experiments. Since we create and manage this dimension internally, there is no risk of non-deterministic resolution of this dimension