jinja2 - loop through a dictionary

Question

I am new with Jinja2 maybe my question is noobie but I can't understand it.

So I use Jinja2 for an Ansible task as a template to create a file, I have a dictionary defined in the Default Variable file like:

test123:
  testA:
    name: test1
    number: 1
    path: /tmp/test.txt
  testB:
    name: test2
    number: 2
    path: /tmp/test.txt

Now in my Jinja2 file, I want to loop through this dictionary and print everything defined in the dictionary.

I tried various examples but nothing does the right thing.

For example:

{% for item in test123.values() -%}
{{ item.name }}="{{ item.number }}"
{%- endfor %} 
{% for item in test123.testB.values() -%}
    {{ item.name }}="{{ item.number }}"
{%- endfor %} 

Error Message:

fatal: [testserver]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "msg": "AnsibleUndefinedVariable: 'ansible.parsing.yaml.objects.AnsibleUnicode object' has no attribute 'name'"}

I thought maybe the best thing would be to create a while loop for this and print everything out but since in Jinja2 there is no while loop I am a little bit confused how to do it.

Do someone has an idea how to achieve that? So once again the goal is to print everything from the dictionary in the Jinja2 file.

Thank you in advance

Solution 1

The below would create a output with all the user names in it

{% for item in test123.values() %}
name of the user: {{ item.name }}
{% endfor %}

Output format:

name of the user: test1
name of the user: test2

If you need something in specific format let me know the desired output

Solution 2

An option would be to use dict2items filter. The template below

{% for item in test123|dict2items %}                                                
{{ item }}                                                                          
{% endfor %}

{% for item in test123|dict2items %}
key: {{ item.key }}
value.number: {{ item.value.number }}
value.name: {{ item.value.name }}
value.path: {{ item.value.path }}

{% endfor %}

gives

{'value': {u'path': u'/tmp/test.txt', u'name': u'test1', u'number': 1}, 'key': u'testA'}
{'value': {u'path': u'/tmp/test.txt', u'name': u'test2', u'number': 2}, 'key': u'testB'}

key: testA
value.number: 1
value.name: test1
value.path: /tmp/test.txt

key: testB
value.number: 2
value.name: test2
value.path: /tmp/test.txt

Comments

[amanb]

That is not a Python dictionary..not sure about Ansible.

[ozlevka]

What python version on target host?

[Mladen Nikolic]

@amanb I used this manual for creating a dictionary in ansible: docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/plugins/lookup/dict.html ( in the example at the top you can see the example) so jinja2 can't do anything with that dictionary?

[Mladen Nikolic]

@ozlevka python version on the target host is: Python 2.7.5

[Mladen Nikolic]

Works as expected :) so the .values() calls all the values in the dict right?

[error404]

yes. then you can access the subelements using the item.name and {{ }} is used for variable replacement in jinja2