skipped role, register and with_items causing headaches

[Paul Baker]

Hi All,

It seems like issues along these lines have been raised as bugs and closed several times... see https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/17500


I have created a role, which I intend to skip under certain circumstances. When the role is skipped, all tasks still run... OK... I don't understand why this is desired behavior but that's beside the point. I have ended up needing to put some very nasty looking "|default()" filters inside of my "with_items" clauses to get the playbook to run. Without the default values I end up with errors like 'dict object' has no attribute 'stdout_lines'

Any other suggestions? I guess I can have different playbooks for different roles rather than skipping roles that I don't want to use, but it seems a little cumbersome.

Thanks,
Paul

---
- name: "create_ironware : Gather information from router"
  ironware_command:
    commands:
     - "show mpls vll detail | i ^VLL"
     - "show vlan {{ port }}"
     - "show version"
    provider: "{{ cli }}"
  register: ironware_checks

- name: "create_ironware : Process VLL information"
  set_fact:
    router_vlls: "{{ router_vlls | default([]) + [ item ] }}"
 
 with_items: "{{
(ironware_checks.stdout_lines|default([[],[],[]]))[0]|map('regex_replace',
 '^VLL (.+), VC-ID ([0-9]+),.*', 'name: \\1\\nid:
\\2')|map('from_yaml')|list }}"

- name: "create_ironware : Process VLAN information"
  set_fact:
    port_vlans: "{{ port_vlans | default([]) + [ item ] }}"
 
 with_items: "{{
(ironware_checks.stdout_lines|default([[],[],[]]))[1]|map('regex_replace',
 '.*VLAN: *([0-9]+) *(Tagged|Untagged).*', 'id: \\1\\ntagging:
\\2')|map('from_yaml')|list }}"