Default filter and dictionary values

[Evan Frey]

I am having an issue with the default value not being honored for an undefined dictionary.  For example, if the setup is as follows

- name: something

  file:

    path: /somepath

    owner: "{{ dir['owner'] | default('root') }}"

and I have a variable of

dir:

  owner: someowner

when I run this, a file called /somepath is created with the owner someowner, as expected.  However, if the dictionary dir does not exist, I get an error of

"the field 'args' has an invalid value, which appears to include a variable that is undefined.  The error was: 'dir' is undefined

instead of running with the default as I would have expected.  if I flatten the variable structure to be

dir_owner: someowner

and change the task to be

- name: something

  file:

    path: /somepath

    owner: "{{ dir_owner | default('root') }}"

this works as expected.  The owner of the file is either someowner if defined or root if not.

[Matt Martz]

You have to default at every step, `default` is only applied to the deepest level specified, so if `dir` is undefined, you would have to apply `default` on `dir` directly too.

Maybe something like:

(dir|default({}))['owner']|default('root')

or making some assumptions that dir will either be defined or not, and when defined it will have `owner`:

(dir|default(dict(owner='root')))['owner']

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Matt Martz
@sivel
sivel.net

[Evan Frey]

You rock, figured it had to be something like that but couldn't find any docs on it.  Thanks!

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