Grouper Developers Forum

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

--On 26 January 2005 08:50 -0800 blair christensen <> 
wrote:

> On 2005.01.26 10:20, GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing wrote:
> > If there is time I would like to start a discussion about data
> > validation.  It is relevant to base groups / stems since a site may want
> > to apply its  own business rules as to valid names, but becomes more
> > important with  custom groups where complex rules may apply to
> > combinations of attribute  values.
>
> Yeah, I know I've been punting on this one so far but we should
> probably get the discussion started.
>
> Do you have any specific examples of validation that you may want or
> need to do?  That may help frame the requirements.

The sort of things that I am thinking of are dependent attributes e.g. a 
unit of study may belong to a department which belongs to a faculty. I need 
to check that each individual unit_code, dept_code and faculty_code exist, 
but also that dept_code is valid given the faculty_code and that unit_code 
is valid given the dept_code. Group types might 'modify' the validation.
> > Where do we put hooks to allow site specific validation?
>
> Some things that come to mind that sites *may* want to apply custom
> validation policies to:
> - Stem creation (name)
> - Group creation (name)
> - Attribute add|mod|del
> - Member addition (restrict membership to certain subject types?)
>
> Anything else?

I can't think of anything else at the moment. The key thing is that it 
occurs in the API rather than say the UI since a Loader should be subject 
to the same validation.

One way of achieving this would be to treat the above as events and to 
register listeners which can veto the action.
> > create(GrouperSession s, java.lang.String stem, java.lang.String
> > extension,  java.lang.String type, List attributes)
>
> This, or something like it, is a possibility.
>
> This reminds that an earlier incarnation of Grouper during the months
> before 0.5 would have made this trivial -- while making a lot of other
> things harder.

It would be nice to have the group + attribute assignment be an atomic 
process otherwise we could end up with a lot of half finished groups i.e. 
all the important attributes might not be set. The same may be true of 
adding members e.g.
listAddVals(GrouperSession s, List groupMembers).


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GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing