Module: xml

Welcome to the xml module community

This space is to collaborate on the Ansible xml module. Feel free to add ideas or help out where you can.

News

• This module ships with Ansible v2.4 !
• We are looking for more active maintainers. If you want to help, let us know !

Contact

• Dag Wieers (@dagwieers)
• Marko Stanković (@sm4rk0)
• Christopher Prescott (@cmprescott)

Action plan

• Upstream xml module to ship with Ansible v2.4 -- (@dagwieers) Done: PR#25323
• Add examples using namespaces to module document -- (@sm4rk0) Done: PR#28113
• Add stub issue/PR templates in https://github.com/cmprescott/ansible-xml (@sm4rk0) Done
• Update README and repo title at https://github.com/cmprescott/ansible-xml
• Add diff support -- (@dagwieers) #27952 #28592
• Add backup support -- (@dagwieers) #27949 #28595
• Make parameters combinations more restricted -- (@dagwieers) #28657
  • Implement required_by functionality in param_spec -- (@dagwieers) #28662
• Fix issues with idempotency/change detection -- (@dagwieers) #28460
• Document reading attribute value in Ansible -- (@dagwieers) #27951
• Close all open issues on original repository -- open issues

TODO

• Review open issues -- open issues
• Make adding attribute values work with just xpath (no attribute parameter)

Notes/Caveats

• lxml >= 2.3.0 is required but CentOS 6.x has 2.2.3. Workaround: install pip, libxml2-devel and libxslt-devel (using yum) and then sudo pip install lxml (gets you v3.8.0 at the moment - August 2017.) References: cmprescott/ansible-xml#114, cmprescott/ansible-xml#115
• lxml >= 3.0.0 is required for predictable ordering of attributes, the module will warn if the lxml version is lower than 3.0.0.
• White spaces between tags will break pretty_print. Reference: cmprescott/ansible-xml#84

Ideas / Questions

• Currently pretty_print forces remove_blank_text and maybe that's not always needed/wanted ?
• What is considered a change ?
  • Does a modification to the XML file or the xmlstring count as a change ?
  • Or do we only look at XML object changes ?
• Implement different XML output rules #28920
• Specific error message in case of XPath exceptions due to missing namespace argument, as this is the common stumbling stone for this module.

The original repository for this module was located at: https://github.com/cmprescott/ansible-xml