Idea to have qmicli output "parseable" data

[Ed W]

On 27/07/2021 14:17, Aleksander Morgado wrote:
> Hey Jack and Ed,
>
>> I have had this exact same question before. There is a MR https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/libqmi/-/merge_requests/190 that does exactly this. I have not made contributions to it so I don't want to take credit for it but I'm quite excited for when it is merged!
>>
> Yes, I was going to point to that merge request. The auto-generation
> of JSON data for all data types is already available in that MR, but
> it still requires to go over all qmicli commands one by one adding a
> few lines to be able to print the JSON output. The MR contains support
> for just a few commands, the ones that the company that hired me to do
> that needed :)
>

Thanks, this looks excellent!

I wonder if the error reporting is worth merging separately? This was one of the oddities I had
noticed that slightly complicated parsing

However, as you have done some work, can I ask what your opinion is on some of the more complicated
outputs? I don't have the code open, but several commands seemed to be doing significant
manipulation of the output structure while printing it. These seemed to be the complex ones to have
to convert really?

Also, inserting lots of "if (qmicli_output_json ()) {" feels like a lot of typing...? Can we do better?

I wonder if we can't go a further up and consider the individual commands to be knocking some output
map alike structure into shape, then the output is just a structure we either output as text, or
output as json as we prefer? I wonder at the moment if the JSON and test outputs would be so similar?


How did you propose to handle the cases where there is both a value for a key and a sub value? For
example in "--nas-get-serving-system" we have

    Radio interfaces: '1'
        [0]: 'lte'

What I did was to store the '1" in a "_value" key under the "Radio interfaces" key

I also provided some heuristics to parse keys like:

    3GPP daylight saving time adjustment: '1' hours

into ['1', 'hours']

However, there is a certain lack of consistency here in the output, so it only "mostly works"


Anyway, exciting that there is interest. I think it's worth kicking around the exact steps as it's
quite a lot of typing to get this done. Any observations?

Ed W


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libqmi-devel/attachments/20210727/9de3a1bf/attachment.htm>