run-action should support a '--format=plain' that just passes the content out

[John A Meinel]

We have "juju run-action --wait" which is a nice way to invoke a command and grab the output without going through 'juju show-action-output'.
However, both of those commands only output yaml/json. Which means if you want to output something to be processed (certificate file, etc) you have to have some way to unwrap it.
While we might end up with multiple outputs from a single run command, that's probably still better to have a way to just flatten it.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

(noted during a demo where actually getting everything to work nicely had lots of copy & paste and | jq and other workarounds, when it should just be a single command.)

[Tim McNamara (tim-clicks)]

How do you recommend dealing with non-printable characters from the action?

[Tim McNamara (tim-clicks)]

Should --format=plain be disabled when multiple units are specified?

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

Plain would indicate just outputing the content as a byte stream. (juju
run-action app create.zip --format=plain > foo.zip).
I would say if you have multiple units we could just concatenate them, or
disabling it would both be potential solutions.

On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 11:20 PM Tim McNamara <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Should --format=plain be disabled when multiple units are specified?
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> run-action should support a '--format=plain' that just passes the
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[Tim McNamara (tim-clicks)]

Link to change: https://github.com/juju/juju/pull/10578

[Tim McNamara (tim-clicks)]

Ian, just double checking. Does --format=plain disable the YAML output? Looking at the QA steps, callers would still need to interpret YAML in order to access the action's output.

From the QA steps in the PR:

  $ juju call mariadb-k8s/0 hello who=world
  Running Operation 259d3f7b-f7ec-47a1-890c-51cc3c9d4ffb
  message: |-
    Hello world!

I would expect the output to look like this:

  $ juju call mariadb-k8s/0 hello who=world
  Hello world!

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

The plain text output is done for "juju call" rather than run-action as we are concentrating on a holistic actions UX change for Actions V2, which can be accessed by setting the client side "juju-v3" feature flag. The existing actions UX is being left untouched for compatibility reasons.

The plain output still does have a little necessary YAML because the actions can choose to set structured data for output. The plain output omits other more verbose metadata related YAML like timestamps etc.