ansible - when statements should not include jinja2 templating delimiters

Question

I'm hoping someone could help. I was wondering what is the correct syntax in using the when statement? I have this playbook:

- 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 during run it gives me a warning but it actually accept it. I not sure if this is ok 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 

It 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'm using ansible 2.3.0 (devel cbedc4a12a) btw. Thanks

Answer 1

The "correct" syntax is to not include jinja templates as indicated by the warning. Your condition doesn't work otherwise because the types are not compatible.

You could try type coercion:

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

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