Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

One of my action items from the last grouper-dev call was to review and 
summarize the outcome of last Summer's discussion of what the Subject 
API v1.0 should look like. I'm sending this to grouper-dev since that's 
where this task arose, and I'm CCing signet-dev since that's where we 
once agreed to keep all things Subject.

Here are some highlights.

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1. Strip Subject type of its identifying status.

v1.0 Subjects will be identified by their sourceId and subjectId. Type 
will remain an attribute of a source. We didn't cleanly determine if its 
value should be exposed as a Subject attribute or not, but that seems 
the logical thing to do. It needs to be conveniently exposed, and that 
would satisfy a conceptual desire (and potential operational need) to 
see Subject objects with their types stamped right on them.

We also discussed whether the "sourceId" should in fact be renamed 
"typeId", making it likelier that deployers would choose identifiers 
that would transcend temporal vagaries of how a site persists different 
types over time. We left the term unchanged, but admonished ourselves to 
ensure that future documentation should clarify what the terms 
themselves cannot. Think of (sourceId, subjectId) as 
(namespaceUsedForThisType, uniqueIdWithinNamespace).

2. Reduce type to a string, lose the enumeration.

3. Specify a capability that supports iterating over sources and types.

Whether that would be an enhancement of SourceManager or a new interface 
(something like grouper's SubjectFinder, perhaps) was not determined, 
though there was a leaning towards the latter.

4. Determine a configuration and initialization strategy that decouples 
source adapter implementations from classes in the reference source 
adapters.

We didn't detail or discuss this item on the signet-dev list, though it 
was much talked about among a few of us offline. This is probably the 
most substantial piece of unfinished business that would be great to 
fold into Subject API v1.0.

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Tom