Puppet users - Sep 2013 - Refactoring my modules and moving from 2.7.x to 3.3 and have a few questions

Mostly surrounding if there are better(less hackish) ways of doing things.

The first is the classic exported resource expiration problem.  My existing 
modules use a wrapper that uses an inline template to call out to
Ruby''s
Time function, set a timestamp, and set the resource to absent after an 
expiration period, a cleanup script then runs on the database node and 
purges exported resources that belong to nodes that would qualify as 
unresponsive + a grace period of a few days.  I see I can now generify this 
a bit more with create_resources, but Is there a better or built-in way to 
do this now?

The second involves puppet being declarative and the edge cases where you 
really need it not to be.  A lot of times I wound up writing custom 
providers or lenses to skirt around this, but when that just wouldn''t
do(or
was overkill), I used a rather hackish wrapper around 
Puppet::Provider::Collection.  I''d either construct the Collection and
then
evaluate it(when I wanted the resources realized) or do an instance_eval to 
directly access the private collection method, followed by a map/collect to 
convert the selected resource into a hash, and return a entirely 
constructed array composed of said hashes.  I was never quite able to 
figure out how I was supposed to pass in equery/vquery, so I wound up 
re-implementing those and the whole thing is pretty inefficient and a bit 
dangerous.

All I really need to be able to do is collect say, all exported resources 
of type foo with target bar into an array so I can iterate through it in 
some of my templates where a provider is overkill and no lens is available. 
 Is this possible yet, or are we still stuck on never allowing this?

Thanks for any replies,
--Nick

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