Grouper Developers Forum

[jpb <>]

Real time updates of groups is a challenge.
Typically one would run a cron job to check out groups that have 
recently changed.
The connector would the update it's end be it AD, ldap or whatever.
So that would mean a lot of polling for each connector.


Case:

Faculty adds a guest to a group and expects bulk mail and authorization 
to work as soon as the 'submit' button is hit.


Currently I don't see a way to trigger updates via grouper except via 
'batch' mode.

Would it out of the question for a 'plugin' to notify systems that a 
change has happened.

For example, I register a connector called 'courses_update' and say I 
want to be notified if any group under courses.* is modified.

The 'notify' table might look like(simplistic).

      | application | groups| operation |

      courses_update | cs* | * |


The operation could include 'add','delete' or modify.

A separate table could be set up to populate all api or gui operations 
for registered connectors.
Sort of a message queue.

| courses_update | cs123 | modify |
| hr_update | staff.nonunion | add |

The connector could then poll for only the updates that concern it and 
ignore the rest.
It would then remove the row after completing it's task.


My guess is that this would require a plugin at update time.
This could be a site specific module that could launch updates or insert 
a message in some queue.

Does this make sense.

The group math ads a somewhat of a wrinkle (or not) suppose adding me to 
one group changed N effective groups.
Should all those connectors know about the change, yes I think.

Anyway, this is just a thought from the provisioning perspective.

-jpb