Enable subcommand if an arg is specified in the parent command

[little-dude]

Hi,

I'd like to build a CLI that looks like this:

# show users
my_cli users

# show joe's contacts
my_cli users --name joe contacs

# edit a contact with the `update` subcommand
my_cli users --name joe contacts --email jane@mail.com update --name jane --email jane@other.com --age 33

In this example, contacts is a subcommand that only makes sense if a user is specified via --name. Similarly, update is a subcommand that only applies if a contact is specified via --email. Is this expressable today in clap? I saw in the doc that arguments can require other arguments, but that doesn't seem to be the case for subcommands.

[epage]

There is not support for this at this time and you would need to do it on your side in your application.

There are a lot of different validation requests we receive and we try to balance them against how frequently they would be used so we get a large pay off to compensate for the build times, binary times, and more bloated API that is harder to browse. We want to explore more flexibility and that is in #3476.

[little-dude]

Thanks for the answer. That's fair enough, clap is already incredibly flexible. I'll do the validation manually.