Grouper Developers Forum

[Chris Hyzer <>]

Well, in the API you ask if a Subject is in a Group.  If you don't have a 
Subject, you cant see if it is in a Group.  With the web service, you ask if 
subjectId ABC is in group BCD.  If the subject doesn't exist, the service 
returns a failure code, with SUBJECT_NOT_FOUND.  I think it should return a 
success code of false (not in group), and SUBJECT_NOT_FOUND.  i.e. I don't 
think it should have to be a recoverable exception, I think it should be a 
normal response.  Thoughts?

Thanks,
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Barton 
[mailto:]
 
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 4:37 PM
To: Chris Hyzer
Cc: 

Subject: Re: [grouper-dev] hasMember and subjectNotFound

If you are asking for advice on what to do about this within Penn's 
implementation, I'd be looking for a way to reduce that 1hr cycle time.

If you are asking for advice on what the grouper toolkit should do when 
a user can authenticate but they're unknown as a Subject, that sounds 
like what the subjectNotFound exception is meant to signal. Are you 
saying that, at present, a client of grouper web services cannot 
translate that signal into some reasonable user experience, eg, a nice 
"we don't know what you're allowed to do yet" message rather than 150 
lines of java exception blather?

Tom

Chris Hyzer wrote:
> Hey,
> 
>  
> 
> In web services, in a hasMember call, you pass in a SubjectFinder.  And 
> in the SubjectFinder you specify a subject Id or a subject Identifier, 
> and for either you can also optionally specify a source.
> 
>  
> 
> At Penn we have the situation where new Penn People try to use an app, 
> and the hourly job that copies their user data to Grouper hasn't run 
> yet, so there is a subject not found exception error thrown from web 
> services.  However, in LDAP I believe it is just returned as a "false" 
> when the person is not in the system.  I think a solution would be to 
> have a custom source where if a person isn't found, it looks in the data 
> of record, and if there, adds them to the grouper source table.  Another 
> solution is to have the "hasMember" web service return a SUCCESS-false 
> when the subject is not found, since the subject is not in the group if 
> it is not found.  I could add an option so that subjectNotFound is an 
> error if we like.
> 
>  
> 
> Do other people want this behavior?
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chris
> 
>  
> 
> Ps. We have a massaged description field that is searchable that merges 
> all the various names and affiliations, which is why we don't just go to 
> the system of record and do the hourly copy...
>