Dapr 1.16.17

This update contains the following bug fix:

• Actor reminders and jobs fail to register when their name or actor ID contains characters such as | or @

Actor reminders and jobs fail to register when their name or actor ID contains characters such as | or @

Problem

Registering an actor reminder through the Scheduler service failed when the reminder name, or the actor ID it belongs to, contained certain characters such as the pipe | or at sign @. The same characters are accepted when invoking actors and when saving actor state, so an actor that worked everywhere else could not have a reminder created for it.

The error returned in this case was also misleading:

a lowercase RFC 1123 subdomain must consist of lower case alphanumeric characters, '-' or '.', and must start and end with an alphanumeric character (e.g. 'example.com', regex used for validation is '[a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9]*[a-z0-9])?(\.[a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9]*[a-z0-9])?)*')

It claimed only lowercase names were allowed even though uppercase names are in fact accepted, and it did not describe which characters were actually rejected.

Impact

You were affected if you used Scheduler-backed actor reminders (the default since 1.15) and your reminder names, actor IDs, or scheduled job names contained characters outside the strict DNS-1123 set, for example |, @, or uppercase letters.

Root Cause

The Scheduler composes each reminder or job into a single name of the form actorreminder||<namespace>||<type>||<id>||<name> (or app||<namespace>||<appID>||<name> for jobs), using || as an internal delimiter. Each ||-delimited segment was then validated against Kubernetes' DNS-1123 subdomain rules, which only permit lowercase alphanumeric characters, -, and .. This was far stricter than the character set Dapr already accepts at its API edge, producing the inconsistency between actor invocation and reminder registration. Because the validator lowercased each segment before checking it, uppercase names passed in practice while the surfaced error still referred to lowercase-only RFC 1123 subdomains.

Solution

The Scheduler now validates names using the same policy Dapr applies at its API edge, so anything accepted for actor invocation can also be used for a reminder or job. Reminder names, job names, and actor identifiers may now contain any character except /, \, #, ?, control characters (including the NUL byte), and the exact path sequences . and ... Uppercase letters and characters such as | and @ are allowed, and || continues to be accepted within actor IDs and names. Listing reminders for actors whose IDs contain || now also reports the correct actor metadata. Validation errors now describe the characters that are actually disallowed.