Loop over json objects in Ansible

Ansible's json_query filter let's you perform complex filtering of JSON documents by applying JMESPath expressions. Rather than looping over the jobs in the the result, you can get the information you want in a single step.

We want to query all jobs in which have a destClientName that matches the value in target_vm. Using literal values, the expression yielding that list of jobs would look like this:

jobs[?jobSummary.destClientName == `BOSDEKARLSSP006`]

The result of this, when applied to your sample data, would be:

[  {    "jobSummary": {      "totalNumOfFiles": 0,      "jobId": 9629,      "destClientName": "BOSDEKARLSSP006",      "destinationClient": {        "clientId": 11,        "clientName": "BOSDEKARLSSP006"      }    }  }]

From this result, you want to extract the jobId, so we rewrite the expression like this:

jobs[?jobSummary.destClientName == `BOSDEKARLSSP006`]|[0].jobSummary.jobId

Which gives us:

9629

To make this work in a playbook, you'll want to replace the literal hostname in this expression with the value of your target_vm variable. Here's a complete playbook that demonstrates the solution:

---- hosts: localhost  gather_facts: false  # This is just the sample data from your question.  vars:    target_vm: BOSDEKARLSSP006    results:      totalRecordsWithoutPaging: 1234      jobs:      - jobSummary:          totalNumOfFiles: 0          jobId: 8035          destClientName: BOSDEKARLSSP010          destinationClient:            clientId: 10            clientName: BOSDEKARLSSP010      - jobSummary:          totalNumOfFiles: 0          jobId: 9629          destClientName: BOSDEKARLSSP006          destinationClient:            clientId: 11            clientName: BOSDEKARLSSP006  tasks:    - name: get job ID      set_fact:        job_id: "{{ results|json_query('jobs[?jobSummary.destClientName == `{}`]|[0].jobSummary.jobId'.format(target_vm)) }}"    - debug:        var: job_id

Update re: your comment

The {} in the expression is a Python string formatting sequence thatis filled in by the call to .format(target_vm). In Python, theexpression:

'The quick brown {} jumped over the lazy {}.'.format('fox', 'dog')

Would evaluate to:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

And that's exactly what we're doing in that set_fact expression. Icould instead have written:

job_id: "{{ results|json_query('jobs[?jobSummary.destClientName == `' ~ target_vm ~ '`]|[0].jobSummary.jobId') }}"

(Where ~ is the Jinja stringifying concatenation operator)