Azure Keyvault Secrets - Type Mismatch Warning

[AssafM-GC]

• Package Name: azure-identity, azure-keyvault-secrets
• Package Version: 1.22.0, 4.9.0
• Operating System: Linux
• Python Version: 3.12

Describe the bug
Pycharm complains that SecretClient "Expected type 'TokenCredential', got 'ClientSecretCredential' instead"
basically a duplicate of this

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
1.
credentials = ClientSecretCredential( tenant_id=tenant_id, client_id=client_id, client_secret=client_secret) client = SecretClient( vault_url=vault_url, credential=credentials)

Expected behavior
No warnings

Screenshots
If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Additional context
When __init__ is called from the class KeyVaultClientBase I tried to change the typing construct from: credential: TokenCredential to: credential: Type[TokenCredential] and that solved the issue

[github-actions]

Hi @AssafM-GC, I'm an AI Support assistant here to help with your issue. While the Azure SDK team reviews your request, I wanted to provide some possible tips and documentation that might help you in the meantime.

• The warning you’re seeing is due to how static type checkers interpret type hints—the ClientSecretCredential actually inherits from TokenCredential, so it’s a valid credential for SecretClient.
• This warning is a known issue similar to what’s described in the issue comment.
• Your usage follows the documented pattern (see azure-keyvault-secrets usage and azure-identity usage).
• If the code functions as expected, the warning can be safely disregarded or suppressed locally via a type-ignore comment.

The Azure SDK team will respond to your issue shortly. I hope these suggestions are helpful in the meantime. If this comment helped you, please give it a 👍. If the suggestion was not helpful or incorrect, please give it a 👎. Your feedback helps us improve!

[mccoyp]

Hi @AssafM-GC, thank you for opening an issue. I apologize for the delayed response; I was out of office.

The summary from the support assistant is accurate -- as for the IDE warning you're seeing, I was able to reproduce the issue. This is unexpected; correctly implementing the TokenCredential protocol in azure-identity 1.14.0 should have resolved this type of warning in PyCharm and elsewhere. Maybe an update in the IDE has made the type checking more strict.

I also confirmed that, as you pointed out, changing this type hint to be Type[TokenCredential] fixes the warning in PyCharm.

@kristapratico, what do you think about using Type here?

[kristapratico]

Using type[TokenCredential] here will break mypy and pyright and isn't really correctly representing what's expected for credential. This seems like a Pycharm bug to me.

[mccoyp]

Sorry, I didn't mean to close the issue -- I misclicked when commenting. I do agree with Krista though after some more investigation. The protocol is correctly implemented by azure-identity credentials, such that other static type checkers (like in VS Code, and older versions of PyCharm) don't raise this warning. I think this is on PyCharm's side, but I'll keep an eye out for updates there and can look deeper into this if it turns out to not be a bug.