Extracting values from YAML into Jinja template for Ansible playbook - jinja2

Question

I have a YAML file with content as like below:
cat ../../ansible/playbooks/vars/patching-config.yml
---
patching_tag_name: "Patching"
my_windows_patching:
- {
OS: "WINDOWS",
tag_value: "myProdA",
frequency: "Month", #patching frequency. OneTime|Day|Hour|Week|Month|Minute
interval: 1, #interval of the schedule.
rebootSetting: "never", #ifRequired|never|always
PatchGroup: testA,
startDate: "2020-01-16T23:59:59Z",
expiryDate: "2020-02-16T23:59:59Z",
duration: "PT2H0M",
timeZone: "Australia/Sydney",
updateClassifications: "Critical,Important,Moderate"
}
I want to extract the values of updateClassifications from above YML file in Jinja Template file MaintenanceWindow.yml.j2
Resources:
WindowsNonProdBaseline:
Type: AWS::SSM::PatchBaseline
Properties:
Name: Windows-Non-Prod-Baseline
Description: Baseline containing all updates approved for Windows instances
OperatingSystem: {{ item.OS }}
PatchGroups:
- {{ item.PatchGroup }}
ApprovalRules:
PatchRules:
- PatchFilterGroup:
PatchFilters:
- Values:
# - Critical
# - Important
# - Moderate
{% for item in item.updateClassifications %}
- {{ item }}
{% endfor %}
I'm trying with the code described above, below one more time snippet:
{% for item in item.updateClassifications %}
- {{ item }}
{% endfor %}
I'm calling patching-config.yml in my tasks/main.yml as below
- include_vars: "{{playbook_dir}}/vars/patching-config.yml"
ignore_errors: yes
- name: create a cloudformation stack
cloudformation:
stack_name: "New-Ansible-cloudformation"
state: "present"
disable_rollback: true
template_body: "{{ lookup('template', '../../cloudformation/patching/MaintenanceWindow.yml.j2') }}"
with_items: "{{ telstra_windows_patching }}"
Finally, invoking role as below
cat ansible/playbooks/patching.yml
---
- hosts: localhost
roles:
- patching-cf-ssm
Unfortunately, it is not working.
Any lead shall be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Couple of things:
Your task is using telstra_windows_patching in with_items where as your variable file has variable name as my_windows_patching.
Assuming you are using the same name say my_windows_patching in your task and var file, if you are trying to save json object in yaml variable my_windows_patching you don't need - before curly braces. You can define something like this
my_windows_patching:
{
OS: "WINDOWS",
tag_value: "myProdA",
frequency: "Month", #patching frequency. OneTime|Day|Hour|Week|Month|Minute
interval: 1, #interval of the schedule.
rebootSetting: "never", #ifRequired|never|always
PatchGroup: testA,
startDate: "2020-01-16T23:59:59Z",
expiryDate: "2020-02-16T23:59:59Z",
duration: "PT2H0M",
timeZone: "Australia/Sydney",
updateClassifications: "Critical,Important,Moderate"
}
If you want to use elements inside my_windows_patching object with dot notation directly you could change the variable from object to a list something like,
my_windows_patching:
- OS: "WINDOWS"
tag_value: "myProdA"