What is the proper way to observe a Group created outside of crossplane (without knowing the ID)

[patpicos]

What happened?

I would like to observe a group that was pre-created outside of Crossplane. I wish to look it up based on its name or path, or a combination there of. The goal is to avoid users from populating the group id (they are easy to misconfigure).

I have tried a few approaches without success.

How can we reproduce it?

Attempt that was closest to get an outcome:

apiVersion: groups.gitlab.crossplane.io/v1alpha1
kind: Group
metadata:
  name: nk-rdc-charts-dev
  namespace: isv-onboarding-continuous-deployment
spec:
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  forProvider:
    name: nk-rdc-charts-dev
    path: nk-rdc-dev
    parentId: 741
  managementPolicies:
  - Observe
  providerConfigRef:
    name: gitlab-provider-config

The logs show that it found the resource (ID 870), but would not update due to mgmt policies..

2024-10-21T14:20:46.717Z        DEBUG   provider-gitlab Skipping update due to managementPolicies. Reconciliation succeeded     {"controller": "managed/group", "request": {"name":"nk-rdc-jzsqb-charts-grp"}, "uid": "fb1adeb6-6d19-4078-b430-b93c2c133b19", "version": "1704501", "external-name": "870", "requeue-after": "2024-10-21T14:21:46.717Z"}

The example below failed because the external-name is not an integer (i cant put "870" because thats what i wish to lookup!)

apiVersion: groups.gitlab.crossplane.io/v1alpha1
kind: Group
metadata:
  annotations:
    crossplane.io/external-name: nk-rdc-charts-dev
  name: test-observe
  namespace: isv-onboarding-continuous-deployment
spec:
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  # forProvider:
  #   name: nk-rdc-charts-dev
  #   path: nk-rdc-dev
  #   parentId: 741
  managementPolicies:
  - Observe
  providerConfigRef:
    name: gitlab-provider-config

Then i tried uncommenting the forProvider because they are required...but that did not work because metadata.name took precedence

I am starting to think i need to create myself a lookup table rather than trying to observe it..

What environment did it happen in?

Crossplane version: v1.16
Crossplane Provider GitLab version: v0.9.0

[MisterMX]

The only way to observe an external resource that has not been created by the provider itself is to set manually set crossplane.io/external-name annotation to the corresponding ID / resource name. Normally this would be automatically by the provider before or after the creation of the resource, depending on whether it is an auto-generated ID or not.

[patpicos]

gotcha. observing a resource will not work for what I am trying to do. I went a different route.