Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing wrote:
> 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.

Bugzilla #271 is to complete support for groups having multiple types. 
Until that's there, the single type they're allowed must have everything 
in it.

> 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.

Witrhout looking into the specifics, I know that we arrived at the final 
naming model too late to get it all baked into the 0.5 release. I assume 
this issue is an aspect of that fact.

> 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.

Name uniqueness will return with completion of support for the final 
naming model, but even if they're unique, names can change (maybe during 
a UI session). The only unambiguous way of referring to a group is by 
its guid (value of GrouperGroup.id). Use GrouperGroup.loadById and 
consider 'name' as a changeable attribute of the group.

Tom