# Quality of life improvement: Add UI validation for secret referencing

**URL:** <https://community.doppler.com/t/quality-of-life-improvement-add-ui-validation-for-secret-referencing/1368>\
**Category:** Feature Requests\
**Created:** [October 18, 2023, 3:13pm UTC](https://community.doppler.com/t/quality-of-life-improvement-add-ui-validation-for-secret-referencing/1368 "2023-10-18T15:13:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![andras](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/838e76/32.png) [@andras](https://community.doppler.com/u/andras)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2023, 3:13pm UTC](https://community.doppler.com/t/quality-of-life-improvement-add-ui-validation-for-secret-referencing/1368/1 "2023-10-18T15:13:30Z")

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Hi everyone,

I just had a major headache because of forgetting to add the closing curly braces while using secrets referencing. Took me a while to figure out why my service couldn’t connect to an outside service and it saying that the password is wrong.

I added the secret like so: `SOME_SECRET=${some_project.some_config.SOME_SECRET`. Notice the missing closing curly brace!

I would propose adding some form of UI validation so that others might not shoot themselves in the foot the same way that I did. Maybe crafting a regex for all syntactically invalid use-cases of secret referencing and throwing a warning in the user’s face whether they **really** want to save a secret with that value.

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**Author:** ![watsonian](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/community.doppler.com/watsonian/32/267_2.png) [@watsonian](https://community.doppler.com/u/watsonian)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2023, 9:15pm UTC](https://community.doppler.com/t/quality-of-life-improvement-add-ui-validation-for-secret-referencing/1368/2 "2023-10-18T21:15:29Z")

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Hi @andras!

Thanks for your feedback on this! This is actually something we’re already working on, so it won’t be a problem for too much longer! In the mean time, sorry for the frustration!!

Regards,  
-Joel

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**Author:** ![James\_Heimbuck](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/community.doppler.com/james_heimbuck/32/978_2.png) [@James\_Heimbuck](https://community.doppler.com/u/James_Heimbuck)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2024, 9:39pm UTC](https://community.doppler.com/t/quality-of-life-improvement-add-ui-validation-for-secret-referencing/1368/3 "2024-06-18T21:39:02Z")

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@andras

Today we updated the [Value Type](https://docs.doppler.com/docs/secrets#value-type) functionality to include `Direct Reference` as a supported type.

Now the if the Value of a secret does not match the selected Type the Type is outlined with a red box.

 ![Validation error](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/doppler/original/2X/0/048b878cdd7b495cdf4cf4c45060df78890a3e5c.png)

If the error is fixed before you attempt to save the config the red outline disappears.

 ![Valid Reference](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/doppler/original/2X/5/511e75a47d79e1c5b13d63b784282e4ab5523e04.png)

If you attempt to save the invalid type you get an error.

 ![Validation error on save](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/doppler/original/2X/7/7ea663d8621c7f0aff116435957103945d5b5978.png)

-James Heimbuck, Principal Product Manager