Impossible - if the statements should not contain restrictions on jinja2 templating delimiters

Question

I hope someone can help. I was wondering what is the correct syntax for using the when statement? I have this notebook:

 - set_fact: sh_vlan_id: "{{ output.response|map(attribute='vlan_id')|list|join(',') }}" - name: create vlans ios_config: provider: "{{ provider }}" parents: vlan {{ item.id }} lines: name {{ item.name }} with_items: "{{ vlans }}" register: result when: '"{{ item.id }}" not in sh_vlan_id' 

and at launch, he gives me a warning, but actually accepts it. I'm not sure if this is normal or not.

 TASK [set_fact] ************************************************************************************************************************* ok: [acc_sw_01] TASK [create vlans] ********************************************************************************************************************* [WARNING]: when statements should not include jinja2 templating delimiters such as {{ }} or {% %}. Found: "{{ item.id }}" not in sh_vlan_id skipping: [acc_sw_01] => (item={u'id': 10, u'name': u'voice-1'}) skipping: [acc_sw_01] => (item={u'id': 101, u'name': u'data-2'}) skipping: [acc_sw_01] => (item={u'id': 100, u'name': u'data-1'}) changed: [acc_sw_01] => (item={u'id': 11, u'name': u'voice-2'}) 

But if I remove the curly braces in item.id in when statement

 when: item.id not in sh_vlan_id 

This gives me an error:

 TASK [set_fact] ************************************************************************************************************************* ok: [acc_sw_01] TASK [create vlans] ********************************************************************************************************************* fatal: [acc_sw_01]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "msg": "The conditional check 'item.id not in sh_vlan_id' failed. The error was: Unexpected templating type error occurred on ({% if item.id not in sh_vlan_id %} True {% else %} False {% endif %}): coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, int found\n\nThe error appears to have been in '/ansible/cisco-ansible/config_tasks/vlan.yml': line 16, column 3, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n\n- name: create vlans\n ^ here\n"} 

I am using ansible 2.3.0 (devel cbedc4a12a) by the way. Thanks

Answer 1

The “correct” syntax is to not include jinja patterns as indicated in the warning. Your condition does not work otherwise, because the types are incompatible.

You can try the type of coercion:

 when: ' item.id|string not in sh_vlan_id' 

See: http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/dev/templates/#list-of-builtin-filters