Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

Hi 

Apologies if this message is recieved twice sympa appears to dislike my 
adress alternating between @ncl.ac.uk and @newcastle.ac.uk so i am using the 
web based posting feature. 



I'm  starting out with grouper and the first thing that  I am struggling with 
is to see is how I start out using it with my userbase. Are there any guides 
on how to use grouper with  a large userbase (73k users)? I've looked at the 
documentation and I can see how to bootstrap the wheel group [1] and I can 
see some example code for adding a user [2]. 

However I'm a bit confused as to how I best to bulk add users.  Should I 
write something based on the AddLocalSubject code[2], or should I be using 
the import tool [3] and figuring out how to get my userbase into an xml file? 
Or should I be looking at some kind of integration with existing ldap stores 
via the subject API and Source interface [4]?

I have already deployed shibboleth login and can propagate that to tomcat so 
the authentication angle is sorted. 

If anyone is looking for use cases my use case is that I need to have a group 
that identifies both medical staff and students. Medical students can easily 
be identified by querying a course databases to see who is on a medical 
course. Medical staff have to be registered by hand after a conversation with 
a medical librarian, the purpose of the conversation is to see if they are a 
medic and may involve looking at their contract.  Once a user is identified 
as  "medical" they can look at autopsy videos held outside the institute [5] 
and accessed via shibboleth.  This looks like the kind of problem that 
grouper aims to solve. I have many more potential usecases and see grouper as 
potentially a useful service for the entire campus. 

Regards

Caleb Racey
Webteam 
ISS
Newcastle University


[1] 
https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Developer%27s+Guide+to+the+Grouper+API+v1.0
[2] 
http://viewvc.internet2.edu/viewvc.py/grouper/src/grouper/edu/internet2/middleware/grouper/eg/AddLocalSubject.java?revision=1.3&root=I2MI&view=markup
[3] https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Import-Export+v1.0
[4] https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Subject+API
[5] http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/shibb.shtml