Ansible URI module passing integer from variable

Question

I set a variable from a previous play that collects a value (integer), then call it in the following task using the uri module to pass it via API. But I always get a 422 error back saying "Value should be integer".

- name: Deploy Staging Blueprint
local_action:
  module: uri
  url: "https://{{ server_address }}/api/application/{{app_id}}/deploy"
  method: PUT
  status_code: 202
  validate_certs: no
  headers:
    Content-Type: 'application/json'
    Accept: 'application/json'
    AUTHTOKEN: "{{ server_session.token }}"
  body_format: json
  body:
    version: "{{ staging.json.version }}"
run_once: true
register: deploy
changed_when: deploy|succeeded

I first tried converting it to integer with "| int" but that didnt work. I then tried "| type_debug" and validated the variable is an integer.

But I still get this error. If I replace the variable with a raw integer it works just fine. Using verbose output it still appears the value is being passed as a string.

"invocation": {
    "module_args": {
        "attributes": null,
        "backup": null,
        "body": {
            "version": "48"
        },
        "body_format": "json",

Any idea what Im missing here or how I can work around this? Im currently running Ansible 2.4.0 for this project.

Answer 1

Yes, this is a really strange default behavior of Ansible. It renders every value as string regardless its original type. So you end up with staging.json.version being a string instead of a numeric type.

This behavior can be altered in recent Ansible releases using the jina2_native flag globally.