# Working with async jobs that require an extra call to an api to check their state

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/working-with-async-jobs-that-require-an-extra-call-to-an-api-to-check-their-state/23036>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [November 15, 2016, 8:56pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/working-with-async-jobs-that-require-an-extra-call-to-an-api-to-check-their-state/23036 "2016-11-15T20:56:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Nestor\_Manrique](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b487fb/32.png) [@Nestor\_Manrique](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Nestor_Manrique)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2016, 8:56pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/working-with-async-jobs-that-require-an-extra-call-to-an-api-to-check-their-state/23036/1 "2016-11-15T20:56:29Z")

</div>

Hello,

I’ve been diving into ansible most recently because I wan’t to automate the management of several virtual environments deployed with OVM (oracle virtualization solution for x86 using xen). I found an [ansible module created for oracle cloud](https://github.com/dbgeek/ansible_oracle_cloud_modules/) that implements most of the functionalities to manage a VM (take a peek at the **oracle\_ovm** file) but I’m writing my own to also provide check mode and have a better feedback of the status of the running jobs, set some timeouts for them and autoabort options too. OVM Manager (the console to manage the VMs, it’s like a Vcenter) exposes an API. The ansible module I just referenced takes a naive approach about the api jobs just waiting for them to finish (forever) and if they do finish, it assumes they were succesful.

The problem I have is I don’t know how to get feedback about the jobs while they are running. I already read the [doc about async jobs](http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_async.html), and it seemed the “fire and forget + check later” approach would help but there’s one problem. The api works this way: if I request to do a post/put request like “Stop VM” (i.e “post api/rest/vm/stop”) it returns a jobId. This ID can be used to check the status of the async job using **another** api call (i.e “get api/rest/job/”). So, what I tried to do was pass the jobId to the “check later” task and call the same module requesting another state that is supposed to return the job status at a given time until it’s finished. That didn’t worked =(, the playbook complains because I’m not able to call modules if async\_status is present (I believe this might be the problem I’m not completely sure, again, I’m just noobing here).

I will paste some lines now, I hope my explanation is good enough, let me know if you need any more insight.

#### ovm module

.  
.  
.

# Send job to stop the vm and return the id of it in the job variable

elif module.params[“state”] == “stop”:  
job = stopVm(restSession,module)  
module.exit\_json(msg=‘vm stopped’, changed=True, job=job[‘id’][‘value’])  
.  
.  
.

# Get the job info and return it in the job variable

elif module.params[“state”] == “jobinfo”:  
jobinfo = getJobInfo(restSession,module.params[“jobId”],module)  
module.exit\_json(msg=jobinfo, changed=False, job=jobinfo)

#### playbook

- hosts: 127.0.0.1  
connection: local

tasks:

- name: ‘Stop Vm test’  
oracle\_ovm2:  
state: stop  
user: xxxxxx  
password: xxxxxx  
vmName: test  
ovmHostname: ovmm-test  
ovmPort: 7002  
async: 3000  
poll: 0  
register: stop\_job

- name: ‘OVM Check stop job’  
oracle\_ovm2:  
state: jobinfo  
user: xxxxxxxxxx  
password: xxxxx  
vmName: test  
ovmHostname: ovmm-test  
ovmPort: 7002  
jobId: “{{ stop\_job.job }}”  
async\_status: jid={{ stop\_job.ansible\_job }}  
register: job\_result  
until: job\_result.job[‘summaryDone’]  
retries: 10  
delay: 30  
failed\_when: job\_result.job[‘jobRunState’] != ‘SUCCESS’

If you run the playbook like that it complains about parse errors. Those errors go away if I take away the module call in the second task but then how can I send the get request to the api for the jobinfo?

Thank you very much in advance,

Nestor