Rethink the _multi and _purge approach

[jiuka]

Motivation

We use Ansible to manage a few OPNsense Firewalls with quit a lot ressources configured on it. Deploying everithing takes a considerable amount time. It would therefore be nice for ous to use some form of mass management with every ressource type. And it would be nice if the purge could be run in the same step. Now we have to purge after the step, either with a _purge module or list and a loop to ensure no ressources are left over.

The current _multi/_purge approach has in my oppinion some downsides. For the user the downside is that there is no easy and cocensistant way to create and/or purge multiple objects of the same type. For the developer it is more work to implement three modules instead of one. I therefor hesitate to start implement/test and document all the _multi/_purge modules which I would need as a user.

Proposal

Expand the module interface of all (object bases) modules to handle either one or multiple objects at once. This could be achived by adding a multi parameter which taks a list of dicts with the same keys as the module already to descript the object.

For example it would be possible to call the dhcrelay_relay mudule on the following two ways:

- name: Single Relay
  ansibleguy.opnsense.dhcrelay_relay:
    interface: 'lan'
    destination: mydhcp

- name: Multiple Relay
  ansibleguy.opnsense.dhcrelay_relay:
    multi:
      - interface: 'lan1'
        destination: mydhcp
      - interface: 'lan2'
        destination: mydhcp
      - interface: 'lan3'
        destination: mydhcp

The mor general options like enabled, state or reload would sty on the top level only.

To ensure that only the mentions objects are present and purge all other a multi_control dictionary option could be added to enable and tune this feature. A-like the loop_control in ansible.

- name: Multiple Relay
  ansibleguy.opnsense.dhcrelay_relay:
    multi:
      - interface: 'lan1'
        destination: Ansible Managed: mydhcp
    multi_control:
        purge: true # Delete all other objects
        purge_action: delete # Delete or disable other objects
        # purge_filter: # Optional filter to only purge specific values
        #   - attribute: destination
        #     op: startwith
        #     value: Ansible Managed

This would allow once module call create all the objects required and remove the surpluss ones.

I am confident that most of the necessary changes could be made at the module_process to process multiple modules in sequence. In the mudules the would need to be a small change to accept the arguments in two ways, however this can be simplified by a helper function. This would keep the necessary changes to the actual modules and main small.

Questions

• What does @ansibleguy think of this?
• What does the rest of the userbase out there think of this? Would this be of any value for you? Are there other _multi/_purge related itches worth considering?

[ansibleguy]

Yeah I agree - that might be useful and speed-up mass-management.
Will have to take some time to work-out a draft