The problem that I found with that approach for this particular use case (maybe using files wasn&#x27;t a great example, since it has its own module and files can be templated) is that the variable itself is a list of dicts. I found that using with_subelements or with_items for this didn&#x27;t reduce the complexity much since I still needed to resort to Jinja gymnastics to get what I needed and then needed to worry about taking that output and casting it to a list anyway.