Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

["GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing" <>]

Hi Arnaud,

One of the major features of Grouper is that all group memberships are 
`flattened` in the database so that complex nesting and group math do not 
need to be calculated at run time. A `dynamic` group would pose problems in 
Grouper because you could not work out the indirect memberships if you 
tried to make it a member of another group.

What you could have is a loader which examines all subjects and applies a 
set of rules to assign them to static groups. How often you need to run the 
loader would depend on how often attributes change. Ideally the loader 
would be able to query for subjects which had actually changed since the 
last run.

Another approach would be for Grouper to have a `dynamic` type, which would 
prevent that Group from being used for membership calculations - or as a 
subject for privilege assignment, but which could be provisioned to LDAP 
where it could be represented as a dynamic group. However, this would 
likely be a big change to the API and make it more difficult for client 
code.

I have CC`ed this response to the dev list so we can carry on the 
discussion there.

Gary

--On 20 February 2008 11:54 +0100 Arnaud Deman <> 
wrote:

> Hi Gary,
>
> Thanks for your quick answer.
>
> This mix was our first idea but now we as the uPortal applications
> (Moodle for instance) access the groups via LDAP  we would like to have
> also the PAGS groups in our LDAP. The second point is that we are
> thinking about using Grouper as the group manager of the whole
> information system and not only for uPortal. The fact that we can't list
> the members of PAGS groups can also be a problem.
>
> I think I will try to write an extension of Grouper to handle this kind
> of groups. I don't know if someone else could be Interested by this.
> I may switch the the grouper devel list to ask the question.
>
> Have a good day,
> Arnaud.
>
>
>
>
> GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing a écrit :
> > Hi Arnaud,
> >
> > Grouper does not support dynamic groups. You can, however, mix and
> > match group stores in uPortal so you should be able to use a
> > combination of PAGS (Person Attribute Group Store) for dynamic groups
> > and Grouper for static groups.
> >
> > Gary



----------------------
GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing