One formula for differing minions?

[Michael Jinks]

I'm new to Salt, starting to get some traction, but still get hung up on what seem like basic issues.

Right now, I'm using the 'users' formula to handle accounts on a minion. It was going really well, I've got a couple hundred accounts under control there... but then today I realized that I only have the users formula listed once in my top.sls, and as soon as I start trying to manage accounts on more than a single minion, I'll have problems.

I've tried everything I can think of to differentiate pillar files, with either no effect (minions still see data they shouldn't), or errors.

I've read:

 http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.grains.html

Specifically, 

 https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/targeting/grains.html#matching-grains-in-the-top-file

...but I'm missing something.

What's currently working:

In top.sls I have:

    'ftp*':

    - users

...and in my pillar I have files that start with:

  users:

...followed by lists of either:

  jblow:

    uid: xxx

    fullname: joe blow

    home: /home/jblow

    [...]

...or,

  jblow:

    password: [hash string]

I've tried to subdivide things in all kinds of ways, but none of my guess have been right. For instance, in top.sls:

    'host:ftp*':

    - match: grains

    - ftp-users

And in the pillar,

  ftp-users:

    users:

      [same stuff as above]

That doesn't seem to do anything. All my other minions with a 'users:' field in the top file would still get everything the ftp minions get.

If I just try changing 'users:' to some other string, in both top.sls and the pillar, obviously we lose sight of the users formula, so that can't be right.

The only thing I can think of that I know would work, is to copy the users formula and do some kind of string replace on all the 'user' and 'users' fields, for each category of minions that I want to configure. But I know that *really* can't be right, defeats the whole purpose.

I'm missing something basic.

[Michael Jinks]

AHA.

All this time I've understood how to handle the top file on the state side. But for some reason I hadn't fully ported that over to the pillar side. No matter how many times I was told "it's just like the states side".

So, for anybody else who stumbles upon this with the same issue: it's just like the states side.

Thanks, IRC guys, for the extra nudge of prompting that it took.

Sigh.