[Freeipa-devel] Converting plugin output

[Christian Heimes]

On 2016-03-21 12:02, Jan Cholasta wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 18.3.2016 15:26, Christian Heimes wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd like to use FreeIPA's RPC interface from Ansible directly. But the
>> output of plugins is rather unfriendly and unpythonic:
>>
>>>>> print(api.Command.dnsconfig_show())
>> {u'result': {u'dn': u'cn=dns,dc=ipa,dc=example', u'idnsallowsyncptr':
>> (u'FALSE',)}, u'value': None, u'summary': None}
>>
>> Please notice (u'FALSE',) instead of False.
> 
> This is how the framework does things - there is no internal consistency
> and no singular place where coding of values is handled, lot of the
> output is generated by ad-hoc code somewhere in post_callbacks.
> Unfortunately this is not easily fixable.

Yes, it's a bit unfortunate. FreeIPA has a rich and powerful RPC-API.
The under-documented and nested output makes the RPCs hard to use from
Python code. I'd wish we had something like JSON schema for input and
output documentation.

>> But it is failing for some plugins like user_find(). The plugin returns
>> u'memberof_group': (u'admins', u'trust admins'). However
>> global_output_params defines the value as an optional and single valued
>> string:
>>
>>      Str('memberof_group?', label=_('Member of groups')).
>>
>> I think the definition is wrong. memberof_group and some other fields
>> should be defined as optional and multivalued fields insteads. Even the
>> field's label uses a plural form.
>>
>> What do you think?
> 
> Yes, the definition is wrong, but I don't think it's worth fixing, since
> you can't rely on a single-value param having a single value in the
> output for any other command and param anyway.

I think it's a low-hanging fruit. All memberof and indirectmemberof
params should be multivalued. That's an easy fix.

Christian

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