Change MailSession in WebSphere for HCL Connections with change detection if anything needs to be modified or was modified

Question

I want to modify the default lcnotification mail session of HCL Connections 6.5/7 in WAS. Since this is automated with Ansible, I'd like to detect if the desired settings are still there or need to be set - including a full sync of the nodes in case anything was modified. I'm struggeling how to detect this properly, since neither AdminConfig.modify nor AdminConfig.save tell me if anything was changed or not.

So I tried to fetch the MailSession object and check if each of my properties I'd like to set matches:

properties = [
    ["mailTransportHost", "{{ mail_host }}"],
    ["mailTransportUser", "{{ mail_user }}"],
    ["mailTransportPassword", "{{ mail_pw }}"],
    ["mailFrom", "{{ mail_sender }}"],
    ["debug", "{{ mail_debug | lower }}"]
]

session = AdminConfig.list('MailSession', 'lcnotification*')
existing = AdminConfig.showall(session)
isModified = 0
for line in existing.splitlines():
    noBrackets = line[1:-1]
    firstSpace = noBrackets.index(" ")
    key = noBrackets[0:firstSpace]
    val = noBrackets[firstSpace:].strip()
#       print key + " -> " + val

    for prop in properties:
        propKey = prop[0]
        propVal = prop[1]
        if propKey == key and val != propVal:
            print(propKey + " not maching:\n\tPresent: " + val + "\n\tWanted: " +
                  propVal)
            isModified = 1

if isModified:
    AdminConfig.modify(session, properties)
    AdminConfig.save()

    import shared
    shared.synchAllNodes()

In the Ansible call, I use changed_when to check if not maching is present in stdout. This doesn't work properly, because WAS return stars instead of the mailTransportPassword - so I cannot check if it matches:

  stdout: |-
    WASX7209I: Connected to process "dmgr" on node CnxCell-dmgr using SOAP connector;  The type of process is: DeploymentManager
    mailTransportPassword not maching:
            Present: *****
            Wanted: dummypw
    Syncronizing nodeCnxNode01
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Full Resyncronization completed

I see no clean way to fix this. Is there another (maybe even cleaner) way, to see if anything was modified and a full re-synchronisation needs to be done?

Answer 1

I had a look at the synchronisation state of the node and it seems that WAS detects correctly if there are changes which needs to be synced. So I'm writing my properties and check the sync node. If it is out of sync, something was changed -> We need to do a full sync. If Modified is printed to stdout, Ansible can mark the task as changed.

AdminConfig.modify(session, properties)
AdminConfig.save()

node = AdminControl.completeObjectName('type=NodeSync,*')
isSynced = AdminControl.invoke(node, 'isNodeSynchronized')
print node + "\n\tIs synced: " + isSynced

# Nasty, but the old included Python of WAS still can't handle boolean values
if isSynced == "false":
    # For the change detection
    print "Modified, starting full sync"
    import shared
    shared.synchAllNodes()