Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

THIA Jean-Marie wrote:
> I am not sure how to begin in naming stems and groups for our
> courses. So if anyone have an idea or practice, I'll be glad to have starting 
> point.

Both Brown and Duke Universities are implementing course group 
management with grouper and have developed a stem and naming scheme for 
them. James, Shilen, would you care to explain what you decided and any 
rationale?

> The second point is the provisioning of groups and member's list.
> There is a Java API, but I am not familiar with Java, and anyway my
> application is written in C# and use the .net framework. This framework
> use a membership and a role provider to handle membership and group
> manipulation and query. So I can write these providers to enable any
> .net application in using Grouper, but I have to talk to the Java API
> and the best way for this is a web service. So my question is about the
> availability of a web service enabled API.

This is often requested and is in our plans. In the meanwhile, at least 
one grouper adopter has experimented with Apache Axis to present 
portions of the grouper API via SOAP. Another is intending to use ruby 
on rails to simultaneously provide three styles of web services 
interfaces: xml/rpc, REST, and SOAP. But these remain just good ideas 
for now, not completed work as yet.

Do you have specific functional requirements that this web services 
interface ought to meet? Real-world needs of yours and others will help 
us to determine how best to present the grouper API via web services.

> A third question, as I have a very poor experience with Java. Is the
membership controlled ? When a group member list is provisioned is there
any form of control with the existence of the member. And if yes, may
all the members be in an LDAP Directory.

Could you clarify what type of control you need?

Potential members of grouper groups are presented to grouper through one 
or more Subject sources. There are reference implementations of the 
Subject API available that gather Subjects from relational databases or 
from LDAP directories.

Tom