--actions flag does not support * wildcards despite CLI help text claiming it does

[IzakMaraisTAL]

The dataform run help text for --actions states:

▎ A list of action names or patterns to run. Can include '*' wildcards.

In practice, no wildcard pattern is matched — not even a bare *.

Steps to reproduce:

dataform run --dry-run --actions "*"
dataform run --dry-run --actions "mrd*"
dataform run --dry-run --actions "*mrd_features*"

Expected: matches every/any action whose name contains the pattern.

Actual: Compiled successfully. followed by No actions to run. for every wildcard pattern tried, even though the target actions clearly exist in the compiled graph. Only an exact unqualified action name (e.g. --actions "mrd_features_inference") selects anything.

Root cause: matchPatterns in core/utils.ts does plain string equality only:

function matchPatterns(patterns: string[], values: string[]) {
  const fullyQualifiedActions: string[] = [];
  patterns.forEach(pattern => {
    if (pattern.includes(".")) {
      if (values.includes(pattern)) fullyQualifiedActions.push(pattern);
    } else {
      const matchingActions = values.filter(value => pattern === value.split(".").slice(-1)[0]);
      ...
    }
  });
  return fullyQualifiedActions;
}

There is no glob/regex handling of * anywhere in this function, so the documented wildcard behavior never executes.

Suggested fix: either implement glob matching in matchPatterns (e.g. via minimatch) to match the documented behavior, or update the --actions help text in cli/index.ts to remove the wildcard claim.

[ihistand]

I do have a good fix for this on a fork. If we'd like to fix it so the behavior matches the documentation, let me know I'd be glad to submit a PR. I don't have much of an opinion about fixing it one way or the other, mostly because I tend to manage my workflows using tags.

[kolina]

Feel free to send a PR :)

But keep in mind that GCP Dataform behaviour of actions filter doesn't use open-source implementation