Structured facts display could be improved

[voxpupuli]

Structured facts display could be improved

[gdubicki]

Fixed in v3.3.0 released today. :)

[daenney]

PuppetDB doesn't store structured facts in any sane way so I'd have to start doing string parsing, loading it as JSON and deal with a whole bunch of edge cases and issues that can arise from there. Besides that it can be rather complex to get it right depending on how crazy people go with structured facts. That's a lot of work and very fragile code which I'm not willing to pull in.

A design to store structured facts in PuppetDB and the API around it is going to be up soon for discussion. I'll chime in on that and make sure we get something that we can work with. Once that lands we can add support for it in Puppetboard in good and reliable way and correctly detect and differentiate between 'old' and structured facts. This would also affect other things like the ability to be able to query for a certain value out of a structured fact for example.

It's a bit unfortunate that structured facts landed before PuppetDB could actually deal with them in a nice way but it is what it is.

[gertvdijk]

Fair enough.

With Puppetboard relying heavily on PuppetDB's API and without sane support (PDB-28) in it I agree this is a slippery slope.

[daenney]

I'm reopening this, just so that there is an issue about it and that people can find the rationale for it. I'll close it in due time through a commit once this gets fixed.

[corey-hammerton]

Starting with PuppetDB 3.0 Structured facts are available in JSON format and new endpoints fact-paths, fact-contents and factsets are available.

As @daenney said it is a lot of work to implement reliable browsing in PuppetBoard with both string and JSON type fact values. This will be on the backlog but if anybody really needs this support please submit a PR with a link to this issue.

[daenney]

So Puppetboard has a jsonprint template filter that you can use, see templates/metric.html and templates/query.html.

It doesn't provide for a nice way to browse and click through it but will at least print it as more humanly readable JSON instead of a long string.

[corey-hammerton]

We are open to PRs if anyone wants to attempt to implement an API for this. Hopefully it can make it into the 0.2.x series.

[corey-hammerton]

As of PuppetDB 4.2.0 a new Inventory endpoint is being provided as well as "dotted query" syntax is made available, also the dot notation is experimental.

It may be possible to make use of these new features in the 0.3.0 series with PuppetDB 5.0.0.