Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Thomas M Goerger <>]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Chris Hyzer wrote:

> > The search function that I'm seeing my install go with is the
> > searchSubject function.  I don't see any way to get the UI to search in
> > any other fashion.  Are these searches used by Grouper from somewhere
> > else?  Is there a way to get the UI to see these search options?
>
> Yeah, Grouper internally uses different mechanisms... e.g. when you display 
> a list of users (showing their description), it should use the 
> "searchSubject" sources.xml query [I just verified this].  When you search 
> for a subject from the screen it uses the "search" sources.xml query.
>
> The "search" query is the one used when searching from the UI.  If there 
> were a way to customize it, I would assume it would configured in 
> media.properties, and I don't see a setting there.  The users cant pick the 
> algorithm.  If you want to change the query, I think you are safe to edit 
> the "search" query in the sources.xml to whatever you want.
>
> > Okay, that's understandable.  Is there a way then to just have Grouper
> > look at only the subjectID as the description when displaying the
> > membership of a group?  When you're displaying something like 2000+
> > group members, its a bit slow on the LDAP side, so doing something like 
> > this,
> > and hitting the Oracle DB would be a lot quicker.  Would Grouper
> > recognize SubjectID as a valid description anywhere?
>
> I tried this, and if you change the media.properties:
>
> subject.display.default=id
>
> This shows the id, not description, but it does go to the subject source 
> anyways...   What is your ideal solution here?
>
> 1. Not show so many members at once (page them)?
> 2. Show the id without going to subject source?
> 3. Resolve the attributes in a batch (not sure if this is possible in ldap, 
> but it is possible in sql)
>
> None of these work in grouper now, but we could work on a change request...
>
For our purposes, I'd say we'd want to show the id without going to the
subject source when a group membership list is being displayed.  In that
instance we wouldn't need to be polling LDAP to pull a name, since it
would be the subjectID as it exists in the Oracle DB that we'd want to
display.  It would be great to just read it from there rather than hitting
an LDAP server unnecessarily.

>
> > Could you do something like displaying two param-values in this
> > section?
> > I tried this, and only got the last one referenced, but perhaps someone
> > that knows xml better than I might know how to do this.
>
> I don't think that is possible, the solution is to either edit the 
> description field from the subject source, or I think you could make a 
> custom JSP tile (let us know if you want to go that route).  Or we could 
> make a change request to allow multiple fields in this config or the 
> media.properties one...
>
> >
> > The other problem with this that I'm running into is that when I change
> > the description attribute, the members that I've already got loaded are
> > no
> > longer recognized.  It seems like Grouper is hanging onto this
> > information
> > somewhere, so it doesn't want to display the change.  So, if I've
> > changed
> > the Description attribute from say, OfficialName to UID, and try to
> > display a group, I get a 'not found' message.  I can search for one of
> > these members using the search, and it displays correctly, but choosing
> > this user gives a 'not found' message again.  Seems like the group
> > information for this user is messed up somehow, and I'd have to reload
> > the
> > database to get it to sync up again.  It doesn't seem like this should
> > be
> > necessary.  Even restarting Tomcat and emptying browser cache doesn't
> > seem
> > to fix this issue.  Has this been seen before?
>
> You are saying you change the description element in the sources.xml and 
> then you have issues where you restart tomcat and you get problems?  If 
> there log entries associated with this, we would be interested.
>
The only error I'm seeing is this one from the grouper-ui.log:

2008-07-24 10:08:17,584 ERROR actions.PopulateSubjectSummaryAction: <
GrouperSystem DEA9C971879C89E0A2C5C1AED3A16BBB-0011
0c9239c0-54f1-401b-b344-c49cb121cb26 GrouperSystem g:isa >
edu.internet2.middleware.subject.SubjectNotFoundException: No results:
searchSubject filter:(& (cn=%TERM%) (objectclass=person)) searchValue: tmg

The only change made to sources.xml in this case was a change in my ldap
source to the description attribute from Official Name to UID.  The cn
would be consistent in either case, so I'm not sure why it would be
throwing this error back.  Would the change in the descriptor be making
Grouper look for a corresponding change on the backend?  I'm not sure what
attribute that would be if it is.

> Sorry that this is not an instant solution, thanks for patience.
>
> Kind regards,
> Chris
>