The user-facing front-end employs a templates.php page to support exporting a Zabbix template in XML format, however, the JSON RPC API does not offer the equivalent functionality. It would be tremendously helpful if a template.export in JSON RPC API (api_jsonrpc.php) method were added which performed the same logic and returned a deserialized object.

When using configuration management frameworks such as Puppet or Chef, it is important to be aware of state, and currently, there is no good way of returning the source XML object that was ingested into Zabbix (e.g. via configuration.import or WebUI), as configuration.export does not return the same XML representation as what was ingested.