"when" condition is not working while dynamically including file

Question

I am trying to include file dynamically on the basis of parameter passed in ansible-playbook. To validate parameter I am checking it in when condition but its suppose to not working for me. Its checking include file first.

playbook.yml:-

---
- hosts: local
  user: roop
  gather_facts: no

  vars: {action: "",validAction: ["action1","action2","action3","action4"]}

  tasks:

    - name: validate action
      fail: msg="please make sure you pass valid action"
      when: action == "" or action not in validAction

    - include: "action/{{ action }}.yml"
      when: action !="" and action in validAction

These are two cases:

1) When action is not passed in parameter

ansible-playbook playbook.yml 

Error:

ERROR: file not found: /path/to/action/.yml

Expected Output:

Should be execute task 1 "Validate action" first.

2) When action is wrong

ansible-playbook playbook.yml -e "action=action5"

Error:

ERROR: file not found: /path/to/action/action5.yml

Expected Output:

when user pass action which is not valid action then it should check in task1 entity not in validEntity . in first task if condition are not valid then it should abort the executions.

any suggestions to handle this case?

Answer 1

Well it seems that ansible does a pre checks of include before it run the function parse_yaml_from_file is called and that fails if no file is on FS

As a workaround you can use the following code, but you might want to report that on Ansible github as a feature request.

Please create a dummy.yml under the directory action for the code below to work touch action/dummy.yml

---
- hosts: all
  gather_facts: no

  vars: 

     action      : ""
     dummy       : "{{ action if action in validAction else 'dummy' }}"
     validAction : ["action1","action2","action3","action4"]

  tasks:
   - include: "action/{{dummy}}.yml"