Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

blair christensen wrote:
> The Subject API provides three methods for retrieving subjects:
>
>   * getSubject(id)
>   * search(searchValue)
>   * searchByIdentifier(id)
>
> The uuid that we assign to groups is an obvious candidate to use as the
> id for retrieving groups.  However, I suspect that the most typical
> scenario, at least outside of the Grouper internals,  will involve
> retrieving groups-as-subject by the group name.  As such, would it
> make sense to have the Grouper source adapter attempt to retrieve
> groups by both id and name?  Internally this would be just a few
> more lines of code and would certainly make the adapter more user
> friendly.

Names are friendly to search on, but they can change and even be 
reassigned to different groups. If an app needs to store an identifier 
for a group, we should provide it with the guid.

Do the above search methods enable an app to search by group name and 
subsequently obtain the guid?

> In addition, would we want to allow stems|namespaces to be used as
> subjects as well?  I would think not but if there is a viable reason
> for doing so it would be easy enough to support them.

Probably not, but that reminds me of my interest in somehow having 
signet incorporate dynamically determined scoping hierarchies. Maybe an 
element of a scoping hierarchy can be a type of subject?

Tom