Odd `id` argument in the `hosts.reports_last` method

[miarmak]

There is a method of foreman.client.Foreman(): hosts.reports_last.

The help function output for it states, that the method takes 2 arguments: host_id and id, that are both required:

Help on method reports_last in module aiccliforeman.foreman_api.foreman.client:

reports_last(self, host_id, id) method of aiccliforeman.foreman_api.foreman.client.Hosts instance
    Show the last report for a host

    :param host_id: <no description>;  (REQUIRED)
    :param id: <no description>; Must be an identifier, string from 1 to 128 characters containing only alphanumeric characters, space, underscore(_), hypen(-) with no leading or trailing space. (REQUIRED)

Indicating different values in this argument lead to the same results. And also official Foreman API documentation states, that this method takes only 1 parameter - host_id: https://theforeman.org/api/1.8/apidoc/v2/reports/last.html. But I can see similar description in that doc and this method here for 'id' parameter. In this case I assume it could incorrectly generated.

Foreman version: 1.11.4 python-foreman: 0.4.19

[david-caro]

The way that Foreman generates the functions, takes all the 'implicit' parameters in the url, and makes them part of the signature of the method, that's why on the python code it has two parameters, while the api docs say only one.

Specifically, the host_id parameter will become part of the url /api/hosts/:host_id/reports/last, the :host_id part. While the id parameter will be sent with the request body.

You could try doing the same request directly with curl or similar, to see if changing the parameters when calling directly the api changes anything. python-foreman is actually quite dumb in the sense that it does not have any special logic to manage the api, it just autogenerates a set of 'useful' methods. My guess here is that the method on the foreman side has something unexpected, you can see for example on the docs for the version you are using that it's using a url that is not the one the api exposes:

GET /api/reports/last?expires_at=2016-03-10+15%3A57%3A35+UTC&user=135138680

So I think that at some point the devs wanted to reuse the code from that /api/reports to generate the endpoint for the hosts, and that it does not work 100% as expected.

You can try asking the foreman devs about it, they are usually very friendly and responsive: http://projects.theforeman.org/projects/foreman/issues

Let me know if you can't reproduce the issue when accessing the api directly, that would mean that python-foreman is messing something up in between.

Thanks!

[miarmak]

Thanks a lot for such a detailed response!

I've tried to access Foreman API directly via curl and it doesn't use this id parameter. Here how it looks like for me (and works):

curl -u <user>:<pass> -k https://<foreman_ip>/api/hosts/<host_id>/reports/last

So there's only a place for host_id parameter, but not for id. I assume, that there's kind of a typo in the Foreman API docs and this id parameter is actually a host_id one.

Thanks!