Grouper Developers Forum

[Jim Fox <>]

> In addition to what Shilen said, this feature is different from adding a new 
> jdbc source in the following ways:
>
> 1. You have to be the grouper admin to add a jdbc source, if you are a lowly 
> department programmer, and you want to add some entities, then you will have 
> to ask your central grouper admin, and more than likely, it will either be 
> painful to do this, or they will say no.  Or you can create groups to 
> represent entities which can be confusing.

I think allowing users to implement their own suject databases
opens a whole new can of worms.

> 2. With a jdbc source, there is no security.  Other people who don't care 
> about your entities can look them up and see them

The entity mechanism does not really solve this problem.  The most common 
bunch of subjects that don't want to be looked up -- and that we have to
comply with their not wanting to be looked up -- are students.  Are all
the lowly departments at Penn going to insert all their students into
grouper's entity subject source?  Is each department going to have its
own source of students?

> Im not sure what we should do about subject search performance... I kind of 
> think we should do fork/join for each source, and not single threaded... :)

I thought this one one good improvement already.  I used to have to do a 
join search on all the subject sources.  With 2.0 I can do the search and
sort on the member table alone.

Jim