Proposal for links as dict (still allowing list)

[ssasso]

If I am not wrong, currently the top-level-attribute links is (the only one?) defined as a list.

That means it is not possible to use the construct _include in it, thus not allowing code reuse.

My proposal is to accept as links value both dict and list.

• In case of list, no change in the actual behavior.
• In case of dict, they dict key is ignored, the dict values must be lists, and they are merged to create an unique list (and back to point (1))

This will allow to have sth like:

links:
  _include:
    - include/links_part_1.yaml
    - include/links_part_2.yaml

which is converted into sth like:

links:
  links_part_1:
  - node1:
    node2:
  links_part_2:
  - node2:
    node3:

which, at the end, behaves like:

links:
  - node1:
    node2:
  - node2:
    node3:

If we do not want to modify the "core code", I guess this can be performed as pre-transformation step in a dedicated plugin?

[ipspace]

I'm guessing you'd like to have reusable topology. Would components do what you'd like to do?

https://netlab.tools/components/

There's also link groups: https://netlab.tools/links/#link-groups but that would require _include within a list, and I don't think we do that.

Other than that, I have no problem if we structure links as a dictionary of lists, and then use the dictionary keys to name the links while flattening the data structure very early in the transformation process.

[ssasso]

Will look at the compontents, thanks for pointing that out! I always forget all the capabilities we have ;)

Will let you know

[ipspace]

Hey @ssasso, could you get what you needed with components, or should we go and implement this one?

[ssasso]

Not able with components. I started trying to develop a plugin for doing that without touching the core code, but gave up for lack of time at the moment :(