Grouper Developers Forum

[Emily Eisbruch <>]

*Grouper Call 5-Aug-09**

 

 *Attending*

Gary Brown, Bristol    (stand-in chair)

Shilen Patel, Duke  

Chris Hyzer, U. Penn  

James Cramton, University of Arizona  

Tom Zeller, U. Memphis 

Steve Olshansky, Internet2 

Emily Eisbruch, Internet2 (scribe)   

*New Action Items*

[AI] (Gary) will update the Grouper source adapter filtering to address the COmanage use case.

[AI] (Chris) will package the Grouper UI lite and provide a readme file.

[AI] (Everyone) will update JIRA to accurately reflect the work being done.

*Carryover Action Items*

[AI] (TomZ) will continue to develop the next generation Ldappc and check in his work by August 19.

[AI] (Gary) will check how queries are working with respect to user audit and report issues to Chris.

[AI] (TomZ) and (Bert) will email Chris their use cases.

**Discussion**

*COmanage use case for Grouper*

Gary is representing the Grouper project on the biweekly call of the team developing a COmanage Limited Use Pilot service. This team, led by Steven Carmody, held its first conference call on 31-Jul-09.

One issue raised on the call is that the Grouper subject API doesn’t do filtering. A user doing a search potentially sees groups that they should not be allowed to view. This is related to the fact that the Grouper source adapter always switches to Grouper system before it performs any query. 

Which Grouper version needs to be corrected for the COmanage team? Probably Grouper 1.4.

[AI] (Gary) will update the Grouper source adapter filtering to address the COmanage use case.

https://bugs.internet2.edu/jira/browse/GRP-306

*UI Lite Update*

Chris hopes to integrate many features of the current Grouper UI with the new UI Lite he is developing. 

- Authentication

- Tooltips

- Externalized text

- Custom tags

- Hide/show

For the new UI Lite, Chris hopes to use AJAX and rich GUI controls and take out some of the levels of interactions. Chris will look into the suggestion to include JSP customizations. 

The UI Lite is geared to editing immediate memberships of a manually provisioned group -- to easily see who is in a group, and add and delete members. Chris is thinking about showing only immediate members.

Ideally, there will also be some advanced features, such as saving all members in a text file, searching for a member in a group, or replacing the members of a group with uploaded information. Could use an advanced button to do more advanced things.

[AI] (Chris) will package the Grouper UI lite and provide a readme file.

Gary noted that COmanage might use the UI Lite, depending on how much metadata they need to track.

The business logic is set up so it will be easy to unit test with JUnit. Goal is to add the latest Taglibs and use the latest J2EE version, probably for Grouper 1.5 or 1.6.

Eventually, it would be good to move all functions that are in the back end to either UI or web services. First, move logic into the API so others can write UIs more easily. Then move into web services those functions that are in the back end but are not available via web services.

*Grouper 1.5 Release*

Items for Grouper 1.5:

Namespace transition

Auditing

XML import export

Web services

gsh

Change log (ready for testing)

Ldappc –waiting for  call on 19-Aug-09 to hear what progress has been made.

Attribute framework – suggestion to break this down into smaller chunks in JIRA if possible.

Shilen plans to soon start work on copy/move functionality available through web services.

Chris noted that for Grouper 1.5 there will be namespace changes work dependent on attribute framework being completed first. To complete Grouper 1.5 in a timely manner, can namespace transition for now just apply to Grouper 1.4 and before? Shilen agreed it could make sense  to hold off on parts of namespace transition until Grouper 1.6 so as not to delay things.

Shilen noted that the  bad membership finder script for Grouper 1.4 does not apply for sites upgrading to Grouper 1.5. However, when upgrading to Grouper 1.5, there can be bad group sets or bad privilege sets.   It was agreed that a script to handle that would be valuable -- it could potentially save support time.  It would be best, if possible, to provide a generic script to fit all three of the set tables.

In Grouper 1.5, when attributes or privileges are attached to effective memberships, then what happens when the membership goes away? Do privileges also go away? Or become deactivated?  This could be a risk area.

Are effective memberships retained?

Chris stated that effective memberships are in membership view and have a UUID. There are virtual effective memberships. Some corruption can occur and it would be good to have a daemon going through and cleaning things out.

The plan is to keep an assignment table for memberships, with UUID and also some other info. If a membership is removed but later restored, it would be good if privileges come back. This may be an elegant requirement and may not be worthwhile to implement in the short term.

[AI] (Everyone) will update JIRA to accurately reflect the work being done.

*Caching Discussion*

https://mail.internet2.edu/wws/arc/grouper-dev/2009-08/msg00005.html

There had been a memory leak issue when sessions closed and caches did not close. However, that issue is now fixed. The remaining larger issue is whether it makes sense to have hundreds of cashes for one simple operation, by creating cashes based on GrouperSession. This issue probably won’t be solved for the Grouper 1.5 release.

A Jira issue has been opened for further investigation.

https://bugs.internet2.edu/jira/browse/GRP-305

*Adding gsh Scripts for WEB-INF/bin*

Chris: Should we add gsh scripts to the WEB-INF/bin dir of the UI and web services?

Gary: Yes, could be useful to do this.

Chris will look at this issue.

Next Call: Wed. 19-Aug-09, Noon ET 

Emily Eisbruch, Technology Transfer Analyst

Internet2

office: +1-734-352-4996 | mobile +1-734-730-5749

Fall 2009 Internet2 Member Meeting, October 5-8
Hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio and LEARN
http://events.internet2.edu/2009/fall-mm/