Puppet : External facter json array iteration inside puppet template

Question

I am sending data from puppet agent to master node. Here I use json array in my facters/facts.d/myData.json file. In master side I have a template. There I want to iterate this external fact json array.

{ "employees" :
     [ 
      {"firstName":"John", "lastName":"Doe"},
      {"firstName":"Anna", "lastName":"Smith"},
      {"firstName":"Peter", "lastName": "Jones"},
    ]
   }

Can I do this thing inside puppet template ? How Can I iterate this array ? I tried following but failed

<% @employees.each do |firstname| -%>
malintha
<% end -%>

Regards, Malintha

Answer 1

Your template is essentially a Ruby scriptlet. To operate on JSON data from your ruby code, you have to deserialize it into a bona fide Ruby object.

Note that your Array contains Hashes, so your template needs to be structured differently, anyway:

<% require 'json'
   JSON.parse(@employees).each do |person|
     firstname, lastname = person['firstName'], person['lastName'] -%>
<%= firstname %>
<% end -%>