Feature Request: diff of the objects

[vooon]

It would be very handy to have support for --diff option.

Implementation is quite simple (pseudocode):

import json

def pretty_print_object(obj):
    return json.dumps(obj, indent=2)

diff = dict(before='', before_header='', after='', after_header='')

diff['before'] = pretty_print_object(old_state)
diff['after'] = pretty_print_object(new_state)

module.exit_json(changed=changed, diff=diff, ...)

[tadeboro]

Do you have any specific use cases in mind that would benefit greatly from this feature? Because there are quite a few pitfalls when it comes to implementing this properly.

We do not produce diffs at the moment because, in the vast majority of cases, the output of ansible-playbook --diff ... and ansible-playbook --diff --check ... would be different, which greatly reduces the usefulness of this feature for this collection. When running in check mode, we have no way of reliably determining the final resource's fields because different versions of Sensu Go might produce slightly different end-results.

But as I said, if you have a valid use case that would also benefit others, we can probably work something out.

[vooon]

For me that may help to find out conflicts in check names.
So when you template check name from various variables sometimes you may get two different checks with the same name.
With only changed=True you likely won't notice that, but a diff with only command changed more eye-catching.