Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Andrew Morgan <>]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, Christopher Holmes wrote:

> We're currently working on setting up groups of all of our classes
> populated via the Grouper Loader.
>
> All of our courses in other systems make use of a unique ID number we call
> CRN, but that's ugly and not really human readable.  We'd like to have the
> group names in grouper be... pretty.   BIO-111 for example, vs. 122356.
>
> Another concern is that, while our CRNs don't change, it's hypothetically
> possible that the pretty names could change over time, as departments
> change names and number schemes get reworked.   Which could wreck havoc
> downstream if the content is linked to the (changing) name.
>
> Making the groups manually this seems to be possible, by setting the group
> ID to be the CRN while the group name retains it's user friendlyness.
> However, I've been unable to figure out how to do this inside the loader.
> Just providing grouper with a group_id column doesn't seem to do the trick.
>
> Is there a way to do this?   Or is my methodology flawed and I should be
> accomplishing this goal in some other way?

Chris,

You can do this with the standard loader by changing your view and query. 
We are doing something similar for loading our timesheet orgs into 
grouper.

Here is our grouperLoaderGroupQuery:

select group_name, group_description, group_name || ' - ' || 
group_description as group_display_name, readers, updaters from 
group_tsorg_all_grouper_osu;


There is some terrible inconsistency in the naming of these fields 
compared to the UI...

group_name is the "ID" in the UI.
group_description is the "Description" in the UI.
group_display_name is the "Name" in the UI.

One of the timesheet org groups we create is:

JIS - Information Services
Name:   120000 - JIS - Information Services
Path:   osu:ref:employee:tsorg:all:120000 - JIS - Information Services
ID:     120000


The ID is the constant number "120000".  We build a friendly display name 
by concatenating the number with the description.


Does this help?  Let me know if you run into any problems.

        Andy