Grouper Developers Forum

["GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing" <>]

I started experimenting with custom group types and came across some things 
I didn't expect:

1) A new custom group type did not 'inherit' all the base type attributes, 
I had to explicitly add them to the grouper_typedef table before I could 
create a group of custom type because the attribute checking didn't 
recognise 'name' etc.

I thought that the reason for having a base type was to ensure that all 
groups would automatically have the essentials Grouper needed to function 
internally.

2) The uniqueness of the 'name' attribute is not enforced - two groups with 
different types can have the same name.

I can see that a stem (implemented as a group) might have the same name as 
a group, but having actual groups be able to have the same name would be 
confusing and create problem instantiating a group by name, as discussed in 
3.

3) The GrouperGroup.loadByName(GrouperSession s, String name, String type) 
requires that you know the type of a group before you can load it. In the 
UI I have been using the group name as the identifier to pass around - it 
makes debugging a lot easier. I can't use this approach if group names are 
only unique to their type - unless I start passing the type around as well, 
but I don't really want to do that.

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GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing