Inconsistent Entity Property Values

[Andrei15193]

I've been using the Azure Table Storage CLI that is built on top of the Python SDK. One of the issues I noticed that in some cases that when I query an entity I get an EntityProperty as a property value and in other cases I do not. From what I can gather I get an EntityProperty in the cases where the value cannot be inferred (through isinstance checks).

This is a bit inconvenient as I cannot just write a switch and compare entity.property.type to the EDM types that are available with table storage, I have to check whether the property value is an EntityProperty, if it is then I have to check its EDM type, if it isn't an EntityProperty then I need to do checks on the actual value. This has side-effects in the Azure CLI tools as well, see azure-cli/8033 OData Type is Not Always Specified When Querying Entities for more details.

The code bellow creates a test table, inserts an entity will all possible property types and retrieves it. If the property value is an EntityProperty then the type is displayed from property_value.type otherwise it is displayed from type(property_value).

import base64
from azure.cosmosdb.table.tableservice import TableService
from azure.cosmosdb.table.models import Entity, EntityProperty

table_name = "inconsistententityproperties"
table_service = TableService(connection_string="UseDevelopmentStorage=true;")

try:
    table_service.create_table(table_name)
    entity = {
        "PartitionKey": "partitionKey",
        "RowKey": "rowKey",
        "BinaryProperty": base64.b64encode(b"\x00\x01\x02").decode(),
        "[email protected]": "Edm.Binary",
        "Boolean": "True",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.Boolean",
        "DateTime": "2018-12-10T20:33:53.4475462Z",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.DateTime",
        "Double": "1.2",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.Double",
        "Guid": "41ddfac7-8f88-4c6c-bc91-a0aa2f036b05",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.Guid",
        "Int32": "3",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.Int32",
        "Int64": "4",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.Int64",
        "String": "4",
        "[email protected]": "Edm.String"
    }
    table_service.insert_entity(table_name, entity)

    saved_entity = table_service.get_entity(table_name, "partitionKey", "rowKey")
    for property_name in saved_entity:
        property_value = saved_entity[property_name]
        if (isinstance(property_value, EntityProperty)):
            print(property_name, "=", property_value.value)
            print(property_name + "@odata.type", "=", property_value.type)
        else:
            print(property_name, "=", property_value)
            print(property_name + "@type", "=", type(property_value))
finally:
    table_service.delete_table(table_name)

I would like that all property values to be consistent, i.e.: for all of them to be EntityProperty instances or at least have a flag to retrieve them as such.