"invalid reference" error with lifecycle.ignore_changes

[LiuVII]

Introduction

When lifecycle ignore_changes block contains data e.g.

resource "kubernetes_secret" "my_secret" {
  metadata {
   ...
  }

  data = {
   ...
  }

  lifecycle {
    ignore_changes = [
      data
    ]
  }
}

Tflint shows a warning on it.

Expected Behavior

This shouldn't cause any issues

Actual behavior

Tflint shows this warning on this code

Error: Invalid reference; The "data" object must be followed by two attribute names: the data source type and the resource name.

Additional Context

$ tflint -v
TFLint version 0.39.2
$ terraform -v
Terraform v1.1.4

[wata727]

Thank you for reporting this.

This is probably caused by creating references for all expressions including ignore_changes since v0.39.0. See #1432.
Normally, unknown references are ignored, but unfortunately the data seems to be misidentified as a reference to a data resource here:
https://github.com/terraform-linters/tflint/blob/v0.39.2/rules/terraformrules/utils.go#L291-L299

This issue doesn't occur in Terraform as it doesn't generate references to ignore_changes. We should avoid this case in its own way. It's a hard question to work around, but running terraform validate can catch reference errors, so one idea is to ignore the errors for now.

[LiuVII]

Thank you!