Avoid context values validation on "cdk ls" command

[madhavvishnubhatta]

I have a python based CDK app that validates context values to make sure the "Required" context values are passed in. I do something like this:

self.input_file_name = self.node.try_get_context("input_file_name")
if self.input_file_name is None:
        error_msg = "Missing context variable: input_file_name"
        raise ValueError(error_msg)

But I do not want this validation to be triggered when I run a command like "cdk ls" (the context variable does not affect the number of stacks created by the app). Is that even a reasonable ask? If that is not possible, should I do validation differently?

[madhavvishnubhatta]

Annotations were what I needed.

Instead of

raise ValueError(error_msg)

I used

Annotations.of(self).add_error(error_msg)

[github-actions[bot]]

Hello! Reopening this discussion to make it searchable.