Overview of Ballerina Swan Lake Update 8 (2201.8.3)

Swan Lake Update 8 (2201.8.3) is the third patch release of Ballerina 2201.8.0 (Swan Lake Update 8) and it includes a new set of bug fixes to the runtime and developer tooling.

Update Ballerina

Run the command below to update your current Ballerina installation directly to 2201.8.3 by using the Ballerina Update Tool as follows.

$ bal dist pull 2201.8.3

Install Ballerina

If you have not installed Ballerina, download the installers to install.

Runtime updates

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for 2201.8.3 (Swan Lake).

Developer tools updates

Improvements

Observability

View the response_errors_total_value metric

Ballerina observability now provides the total number of errors in responses as a metric via the response_errors_total_value.

Define the service name in traces

You can now add a suffix to the service name shown in the tracer providers (Jaeger, Zipkin, and New Relic) by passing an environment variable in the runtime as given below.

$ BAL_OBSERVE_SERVICE_NAME_SUFFIX=<suffix> bal run

By default, the service name will be the base path or the display name of the service.

XML to record converter

Improved the XML to Ballerina record conversion logic with enhanced support for the intersection of child nodes and XML namespaces, ensuring a more accurate and versatile experience for the Ballerina VS Code extension's Paste XML as record feature.

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for Swan Lake Update 8 (2201.8.3) of the repositories below.

• Test framework
• OpenAPI

Backward-incompatible changes

• Changed the OpenAPI tool client code generation from representing the OpenAPI Specification byte format of the string type as Ballerina byte[], to using Ballerina string type as shown in the example below, due to an issue with the previously generated code. This change will break the compatibility of any existing generated code.

  OpenAPI sample

  components:
    schemas:
      ByteExample:
        type: string
        format: byte

  Generated Ballerina code - before

  type ByteExample byte[];

  Generated Ballerina code - after

  type ByteExample string;

• Changed the OpenAPI tool client resource/remote code generation of the http:Response to a nil return type when the operation in the OpenAPI specification has a response with no content. With this improvement, the already generated code will be altered when regenerated with the Ballerina Swan Lake Update 8 (2201.8.3) version as shown in the example below.

  OpenAPI sample

  /user/draft:
      delete:
        operationId: deleteDraft
        parameters:
          - in: query
            name: userId
            schema:
              type: string    
        responses:
          "200":
            description: Successful response //No content type

  Generated client resource/remote function - before

  resource isolated function delete user/draft(string? userId = ()) returns http:Response|error {
      string resourcePath = string `/users/drafts/${getEncodedUri(id)}`;
      map<anydata> queryParam = {"userId": userId};
      resourcePath = resourcePath + check getPathForQueryParam(queryParam);
      http:Response response = check self.clientEp->delete(resourcePath);
      return response;
  }

  Generated client resource/remote function - after

  resource isolated function delete user/draft(string? userId = ()) returns error? {
      string resourcePath = string `/user/draft`;
      map<anydata> queryParam = {"userId": userId};
      resourcePath = resourcePath + check getPathForQueryParam(queryParam);
      return self.clientEp->delete(resourcePath);
  }