Templating the Output

Some of the tools allow you to customize the output with templates. This gives you the ability to customize the output to your needs. We use the Jinja2 templating engine.

Any command which has the ability to use a Jinja2 template has the respective options. You can see then when calling the help:

$ fotoobo ems monitor connections -h

# some output is omitted here

╭─ Options ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ --output    -o   [output]    The file to write the output to. [default: None]           │
│ --raw       -r               Output raw data.                                           │
│ --template  -t   [template]  The jinja2 template to use (use with -o). [default: None]  │
│ --help      -h               Show this message and exit.                                │
╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

The –raw Option

To get an idea of what values you may use in a Jinja2 template use the option --raw. This gives you the raw json representation of the generated data.

Example for raw output

$ fotoobo ems monitor connections --raw
{
│   'data': [
│   │   {
│   │   │   'token': 'offlineLong',
│   │   │   'value': 111,
│   │   │   'name': 'Offline for 30 days or more'
│   │   },
│   │   {
│   │   │   'token': 'offlineNominal',
│   │   │   'value': 222,
│   │   │   'name': 'Offline'
│   │   },
│   │   {
│   │   │   'token': 'offlineRecent',
│   │   │   'value': 333,
│   │   │   'name': 'Offline for less than 1 hour'
│   │   },
│   │   {
│   │   │   'token': 'online',
│   │   │   'value': 444,
│   │   │   'name': 'Online'
│   │   }
│   ],
│   'fotoobo': {
│   │   'offlineLong': 111,
│   │   'offlineNominal': 222,
│   │   'offlineRecent': 333,
│   │   'online': 444
│   }
}

Accessing the Data

Normally we see two keys in the main dictionary (data and fotoobo) where data contains the raw data returned from the accessed device and fotoobo is calculated data from within the used tool (which in this case was ems monitor connections)

Let’s assume you want to access the online value in the fotoobo context. Simply use the following syntax in your template:

{{ fotoobo.online }}

Templating Example

Assuming we still use the same raw output as above we can use the following template to write our output to a file

template.j2

There are {{ fotoobo.online }} clients online.

Now run the tool with the template and the desired output file:

$ fotoobo ems monitor connections -t template.j2 -o output.txt

Finally you’ll find your output file with the following content:

output.txt

There are 444 clients online.

Of course this is just a minimalistic example of what templates can do for you. If you need more sophisticated output please see the documentation and examples on the Jinja2 Homepage.

Have fun with templates!