Grouper Developers Forum

[Rob Hebron <>]

> >  However, there’s one major drawback: the EsbListenerBase abstract class
>
> >  defines the “dispatchEvent” event method as taking a JSON string
> parameter.
>
> >  I think it would be much more effective if the API instead accepted a
>
> >  single EsbEvent object as the parameter of the “dispatchEvent” method.
>
> >  This would then turn EsbConsumer into a generic provisioning connector
>
> >  (which would probably mean it could be renamed).
>
> >
>
> >  We actually have made these modifications for our implementation, and
>
> >  we’d love to share them with the community if you think they would be
> beneficial.
>
> Note you can convert back to JSON to the beans if you like J. Also note
> that you
>
> would get multiple EsbEvents, not just one. That said, I do think your
> idea is good,
>
> Rob owns this code, Rob, what do you think?

Thinking back, I believe that the original design allowed for single 
events only, then I made changes to allow for multiple events. I have 
never used multiple events in a live environment (for similar reasons to 
those Nathan outlines), so I'd be happy to make the change if no-one 
else is using it for multiple events.

We've been using the ESB consumer at Cardiff University to sync all 
group memberships from Grouper to LDAP for about 6 months now and it has 
proved very reliable, with no need for periodic bulk sync. This does 
rely on each part of the chain reporting errors correctly so that 
retries happen properly where appropriate. On a related point: I find 
that the latency in the ESBConsumer is insignificant in comparison with 
latency in other operations in the provisioning chain.

Rob