Incorrect return type

[jaehyi-aws]

Describe the issue

The documentation for get_account_authorization_details API call specifies an incorrect return type in the response. It says that PolicyDocument is of type string, but it is returned as a dictionary.

Links

https://boto3.amazonaws.com/v1/documentation/api/latest/reference/services/iam/client/get_account_authorization_details.html

[RyanFitzSimmonsAK]

Hi @jaehyi-aws, thanks for reaching out. I was able to reproduce this behavior. I've reached out to the IAM service team to clarify what the intended behavior here and potentially fix the documentation. I'll let you know when I have any updates.

Ticket # for internal use : P200806098

[RyanFitzSimmonsAK]

Thanks for your patience. Both the service and the SDK are working as intended here. The API reference for GetAccountAuthorizationDetails has the following note.

Policies returned by this operation are URL-encoded compliant with RFC 3986. You can use a URL decoding method to convert the policy back to plain JSON text. For example, if you use Java, you can use the decode method of the java.net.URLDecoder utility class in the Java SDK. Other languages and SDKs provide similar functionality.

So, the service is returning a string, but because that string is basically unreadable, the SDK does this decoding automatically, and returns it as a dictionary.

https://github.com/boto/botocore/blob/51f1d36c1809357eb6322fdc699d00efe74c0218/botocore/handlers.py#L551

def json_decode_policies(parsed, model, **kwargs):
    # Any time an IAM operation returns a policy document
    # it is a string that is json that has been urlencoded,
    # i.e urlencode(json.dumps(policy_document)).
    # To give users something more useful, we will urldecode
    # this value and json.loads() the result so that they have
    # the policy document as a dictionary.
    output_shape = model.output_shape
    if output_shape is not None:
        _decode_policy_types(parsed, model.output_shape)

The documented return type of PolicyDocument can't be changed, since the model file is correct that the service is returning a string. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[jaehyi-aws]

Thanks for the information!

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