Grouper Developers Forum

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

At the last conference call Minh reminded me that I was going to work out 
how much effort it would be to implement a 'Recent groups' feature which 
would allow the user to see groups they had created / modified recently.

From a UI perspective it should be quite straightforward - simply display a 
list of groups returned by an appropriate API call. I already do this in 
several places and can re-use some existing tiles.

It probably makes sense to have a 'switch' on the 'Manage Groups' page 
which toggles between a display of all groups a user has privileges over, 
and recent items. The default view could be configurable through a 
properties file.

It should be noted that Grouper maintains  modifytime and modifysource 
fields in the Grouper_group table. If another subject modifies a group you 
have modified, the recent items list may not be truly representative of 
what you have done - it will depend on whether you share responsibility for 
management of some groups.

We also talked about having a 'Favorites' feature which would effectively 
allow a user to 'bookmark' groups of interest and provide a quick way of 
accessing them. Rather than create new tables for storing such information 
it might be possible to implement favorites as a group of group aliases 
(aliases would be better than actual groups if we didn't need to maintain 
effective memberships). If we wanted to provide more structure we could 
reserve a hierarchy e.g. personal:GaryBrown:_favorites (configurable) and 
allow the user to place group aliases in their own hierarchy below this 
point.

We have talked about group aliases before but not really about how they 
might be implemented. In the favorites example I can see that an alias 
could be implemented as a special group type....

Gary




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GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing