Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

Newbies are welcome! And in that category I suspect that you're a ringer 
anyway...

The subject API can indeed pull someone out of your IdMS (yes, you got 
that acronym right) and expose a set of their attributes. But its design 
has been oriented towards several specific one-subject-at-a-time 
scenarios (see the wiki page at 
<https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/i2miCommon/Subject+API>).

But now we're talking about a need to maintain a view over the entire 
set of subjects to be aware of changes in attributes of any subset of 
them. A very different type of use, one that the current API and code 
are unprepared for.

I'm sure it can be done, but resources must be balanced against 
priorities and direction. If you'll be at the Internet2 meeting, there's 
a combined and open signet-grouper working group session. You can add 
your voice to those that help determine our priorities and direction!

Chris Hyzer wrote:
> Sorry to be a newbie, but just trying to understand the language and 
> concepts here...
>
> > The problem, as I mentioned in another message, is that the subject API
> > provides only loose coupling with your IdMS data.
> >   
> I assume idms is identity management system.  lets give an example.  at 
> penn we have a penn_id, which is an 8 digit number assigned to each person.
> So if we had a query that returned penn_id's for users who should be in 
> a group, you are saying the problem is that there is a loose
> coupling between the penn_id and the subject api id?  So grouper would 
> need to somehow lookup the subject api id?   And if the query
> just returned a list of subject api id's that would be nice for grouper 
> but might be inconvenient for users?
>
> Thanks!
> Chris