Description
Property sources in the environment are ordered, however the /env endpoint doesn't guarantee that a client will see this ordering. It uses a map for the property sources and, while the entries are ordered on the server side, there's no guarantee that a client will preserve that ordering. For example, the ordering of the keys with curl is:
profilesserver.portsservletContextInitParamssystemPropertiessystemEnvironmentapplicationConfig: [classpath:/application.properties]
But the ordering of the keys with HTTPie is alphabetical:
applicationConfig: [classpath:/application.properties]profilesserver.portsservletContextInitParamssystemEnvironmentsystemProperties
There's also a secondary problem that profiles isn't a property source (it's actually a list of the environment's active profiles) and if someone adds a property source named profiles the two will clash and the profiles property source will overwrite the list of the environment's active profiles.
To make it clear that the ordering of the property sources is significant I think it would be better if the response used a list rather than a map. This would also separate the property sources from the list of active profiles, avoiding the clash. Something like this:
{
"activeProfiles": [],
"propertySources": [
{
"name": "systemEnvironment",
"properties": {
// …
}
},
{
"name": "systemProperties",
"properties": {
// …
}
}
]
}