with_dict fatal error after conditional include

[Chip Selden]

Ansible Community,

I'm using a conditional include statement to call a task file which has a task that uses a "with_dict" loop. When the include statement conditional fails, I'd like the task in "option.yml" to be skipped  as the task would result in an error anyway. 

When this is run, I get an error "with_dict expects a dict" since there is no dictionary "groups[{{ grps[2] }}]". Why does Ansible try to evaluate the task at all since it should be skipped because of the include conditional?

Ideally, there would be a way to use a "with_items" loop with an include statement, but I am aware that that is intentionally not allowed.

(Note: I know this is a terrible example of how/when to use an include statement, but it shows the gist of how the error occurs. My actual usage is much more complicated.)

## variables

---

people:

  admins:

    alice:

      name: Alice Anderson

      age: 24

    bob: 

      name: Bob Brown

      age: 29

  devs:

    chris:

      name: Chris Campbell

      age: 34

groups:

  - admins

  - devs

## file main.yml

---

- debug: var=groups

- include: option.yml

  vars:

    group: "{{groups[2]}}"

  when: "2 < groups|length"

## file option.yml

---

- name: Print person info

  shell: "echo {{item.value.name}} is {{item.value.age}}"

  with_dict: groups[group]

[Barry Kaplan]

I just ran into this same problem. Here is a much simpler test case:

- debug: msg="DICT {{item.key}}"

  when: undefined_dict is defined

  with_dict: undefined_dict

results in:

TASK: [consul | debug msg="DICT {{item.key}}"] ********************************

fatal: [consul-client-1] => with_dict expects a dict

[Barry Kaplan]

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/10892

[Barry Kaplan]

I just found https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/8546, which explains clearly that when is for each item in the loop. (Which I now recall reading in the docs). So this is clearly not a bug.

And the workaround in that issues works just fine for my case.

[Barry Kaplan]

But related, and where this started for me, was running into this via a conditional include:

main.yml

- { include: service_def.yml, when: consul_services is defined }

service_def.yml

- name: Create service definitions

  template: > ...

  with_dict: consul_services

I did not expect service_def.yml to even be loaded in this case, but it clearly does. What exactly is happening with task includes with a 'when: false'? Does each task in the include get a hidden 'when: false' added to it? That would explain the behavior, but its definately not the behavior of least surprise to me.