When trying to work with json parameters, or json/map data returned by e.g SoftwareDeploymentGroup, it's very inconvenient that neither str_replace nor list_join will accept anything other than strings/numbers.
It's possible to pass map/list data via input_values via SoftwareDeployments, but it seems like these end up with the python string __repr__ of the dict, not actually serialized as json, which is an inconvenient format to consume inside the nodes (doesn't work with jq, python json.loads etc)
I'd like to:
1. Allow str_replace to accept map and list values (which are currently rejected with an error), and serialize them as json
2. Same for list_join, which also errors for non-string input, we can serialize map/list values to json, then join that
3. Work out a backwards compatible way to enable transparent conversion of a list/map input_values value to a json string when consumed in the hook. We already have a "Json" and "String" types allowed in the inputs schema, but I can't see if/where there is any explicit type conversion associated with this - need to discuss with stevebaker how this might work.
The motivation behind this is to avoid the sort of mess demonstrated here:
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/215694/3/puppet/extraconfig/all_nodes/network-cisco.yaml
This could probably be improved, but there's a mess attempting to deal with the fact that it's impossible to pass a json parameter in to the node in a format that can be easily deserialized (e.g json, so it can be handled via jq in a shell script or directly via a tiny python script).
Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https:/