Combining JSON items using JMESPath and/or Ansible

Question

I have an Ansible playbook that queries a device inventory API and gets back a JSON result that contains a lot of records following this format:

{
    "service_level": "Test", 
    "tags": [
        "Application:MyApp1"
    ], 
    "fqdn": "matestsvcapp1.vipcustomers.com", 
    "ip": "172.20.11.237", 
    "name": "matestsvcapp1.vipcustomers.com"
}

I then loop through these ansible tasks to query the JSON result for each of the IP addresses I care about:

- name: Set JMESQuery
  set_fact:
    jmesquery: "Devices[?ip_addresses[?ip.contains(@,'{{ ip_to_query }}' )]].{ip: '{{ ip_to_query }}', tags: tags[], , service_level: service_level }"

- name: Store values
  set_fact:
    inven_results: "{{ (inven_results| default([])) + (existing_device_info.json | to_json | from_json | json_query(jmesquery)) }}"

I then go on to do other tasks in ansible, pushing this data into other systems, and everything works fine.

However, I just got a request from management that they would like to see the 'service level' represented as a tag in some of the systems I push this data into. Therefore I need to combine the 'tags' and 'service_level' items resulting in something that looks like this:

{ 
    "tags": [
        "Application:MyApp1",
        "service_level:Test"
    ], 
    "fqdn": "matestsvcapp1.vipcustomers.com", 
    "ip": "172.20.11.237", 
    "name": "matestsvcapp1.vipcustomers.com"
}

I've tried modifying the JMESPath query to join the results together using the join function, and tried doing it the 'ansible' way, using the combine or map, but I couldn't get either of those to work either.

Any thoughts on the correct way to handle this? Thanks in advance!

Note: 'tags' is a list of strings, and even though it's written in key:value format, it's really just a string.

Answer 1

to add two arrays you use the + operator like this:

ansible localhost -m debug -a 'msg="{{ b + ["String3"] }}"' -e '{"b":["String1", "String2"]}'

result:

localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "msg": [
        "String1",
        "String2",
        "String3"
    ]
}

So if i take your json code as test.json you could run

ansible localhost -m debug -a 'msg="{{ tags + ["service_level:" ~ service_level ] }}"' -e @test.json

Result:

localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "msg": [
        "Application:MyApp1",
        "service_level:Test"
    ]
}

With this knowledge you can use set_fact to put this new array in a variable for later use.