Directly pass dashboard content

[Hipska]

SUMMARY

Having the option to directly pass the dashboard content would eliminate the need to first create a file on the local filesystem.

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

community.grafana.grafana_dashboard

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The dashboard definition could come from a ansible var (object or JSON string) or directly passed to the task.

- name: Import Grafana dashboard foo from ansible var object
  community.grafana.grafana_dashboard:
    grafana_url: http://grafana.company.com
    grafana_api_key: "{{ grafana_api_key }}"
    state: present
    content: "{{ foo_dashboard }}"

- name: Import Grafana dashboard foo from json string
  community.grafana.grafana_dashboard:
    grafana_url: http://grafana.company.com
    grafana_api_key: "{{ grafana_api_key }}"
    state: present
    content: >
      {
        "title": "Foo",
        "style": "dark",
        ...
      }

# looks useless, but needs to be supported if the ansible var could be type object instead of JSON string
- name: Import Grafana dashboard foo from yaml
  community.grafana.grafana_dashboard:
    grafana_url: http://grafana.company.com
    grafana_api_key: "{{ grafana_api_key }}"
    state: present
    content:
      title: Foo
      style: dark
      ...

[Nemental]

Hi, first of all, thank you very much for your feature idea. 🙏 I'm not sure if there's enough demand for the use case to actively work on it. If you're interested in working on the feature, then please do. ☺️ If you specify a variable (which is probably defined in another variables-file) as a reference for content, I think you can also specify the dashboard JSON straight away, although this also has the disadvantage of very long files. I think defining the dashboard in YAML format under content is too maintenance-intensive and implements another abstraction level. All in all, I don't know if this actually offers any advantages. Maybe I'm overlooking something, proof me wrong!

[Hipska]

Thanks @Nemental, I gave it a try with #426, would you mind giving it a look and tell me if I'm going in the right direction?

[Hipska]

The YAML part is to support the first use-case:

- name: Import Grafana dashboard foo from ansible var object
  community.grafana.grafana_dashboard:
    grafana_url: http://grafana.company.com
    grafana_api_key: "{{ grafana_api_key }}"
    state: present
    content: "{{ foo_dashboard }}"

Even if foo_dashboard would have been defined as string, Ansible returns it as object because the string is json-like. If the content parameter does not support objects, then a user needs to do | to_json, which is extra work which should not bee needed. Ansible/Jinja does some weird stuff when it thinks the var contains json or yaml, this is to workaround that.