Programmable/Advanced Surveys [Tower]

[ilyashusain]

Proposal:

Allow the user to create advanced surveys in Tower with an 'Advanced' option, that when run can facilitate the construction of complicated blocks of variables at run time. Right now, you can only use the survey for basic variables at runtime. The advanced survey should allow for:

• basic variables
• dictionaries of variables
• dictionaries of dictionaries of variables
• lists of dictionaries

And so on.

Something along these lines:

config:
  EU:
    DC:
      FR4:
        SC0102:
          - agent:
            vlan:
          - agent:
            vlan:
        SC0304:
      LD5:
        SC0102:
        SC0304:
  US:
    DC:
      LA2:
        SC0102:
        SC0304:
      NY1:   
        SC0102:
        SC0304:

This can be achieved by allowing the engineer to assign a survey question to a block of variable text that they specify when constructing the survey in the EDIT SURVEY option.

You could also allow a survey to pull file names from specific directories to auto-fill the available options. Hence why it should be programmable. The possibilities are endless.

Author: ilyashusain IRC: handle (if different)

Date: 2020-09-26

• Status: New
• Proposal type: Ansible Tower
• Targeted release: future release
• Associated PR: n/a
• Estimated time to implement: 20 days

Motivation

This will be extremely useful to many organizations.

Problems

What problems exist that this proposal will solve?

• Problem Docker Modules #1
  Makes the end users experience a lot more streamlined in that they do not need to modify code in git/another scm for a task and then refresh the tower project to sync the git repo, and then run the template... this is quite tedious. They can instead construct that code at runtime by means of a survey by directly running the template.

• Problem Adding Docker module proposals #2
  Current survey is too basic.

• Or just describe the problem if there is just one.
  n/a.

Solution proposal

• Describe your suggested solution here.
  Flexibility here. Up to you how you want to achieve this.

• Insert code in snippets if you would like as shown.
  n/a.

• Be sure to explain how this solves problems.
  See '### Problems' above.

Dependencies (optional)

Explain any dependencies. This section is optional but could be helpful.

• Dependency Docker Modules #1
  n/a.
• Dependency Adding Docker module proposals #2
  n/a.

Testing (optional)

Does / should this require testing, and if so, how? Describe here. This section is optional but could be helpful.
n/a.

Documentation (optional)

Does / should this require documentation? If so, describe here. This section is optional but could be helpful.
n/a.

Anything else?

More attention needs to be directed towards the survey feature.

[bcoca]

This is for 'proposals' issue queue is for Ansible itself, not awx/tower, that has it's own location for enhancements/proposals

Also, there is already an RFE that covers this ansible/awx#20