i am trying to build out a simple example but have been short on time lately ,once i get it done i can put the links here

related note, when i dump the variable the string is an urn

Here’s the example https://github.com/MMartyn/pulumi-foo

Let me know if you want to test anything

@ancient-policeman-24615 I am wondering if these changes that you are working on are related and if so if you would like me to test it out or anything.

They do work in a similar area to where I think you are getting the area from, so they might turn out to be tangentially related.

I figured it out and it is quite a nuanced bug. Issue presents itself when I have Provider A returning a reference to a Provider B resource but the main stack doesn’t use any Provider B’s resources directly in the main stack, only through Provider A. For example, if I have a provider that returns an s3 bucket, and then pass that s3 bucket into another component in Provider A it will fail as the aws provider wasn’t registered in the main stack so it treats the urn as a string instead of rehydrating the reference. However, if I create some aws resource in the main stack it will work. I have a feeling there is some initialization code that sets up resource tracking for a provider that doesn’t happen when I don’t directly use it within the main stack.

Which has now lead me to how imports behave on TS. Looks like I can define my import as

import "@pulumi/aws";

instead of

import * as aws from "@pulumi/aws";

on the main stack and it will ensure that the provider is added without needing to create an aws resource directly