Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Julio Polo <>]

I have no regrets, but I did notice that our reference groups for majors have been more widely used than our course roster/faculty assignment groups. That's probably because learning management systems are already integrated with the student system to handle class rosters, mailing lists, etc.

Our reference groups for registration go from a specific class section and progress all the way up to the campus/term level. It is these high-level enrollment groups that are getting used thus far.

Rosters are split into registration and instructor top-level folders.  Under each of those, there's this hierarchy of folders (note that campus is used in the folder hierarchy because we are a 10-campus system):

<TERM>:<CAMPUS>:<COURSE-ALPHA>:<COURSE-NUMBER>:<COURSE-REFERENCE-NUMBER-AS-SECTION-IDENTIFIER>: (section specific, the rest below are roll-ups built by adding section-specific groups or nesting one-level-up roll-up groups)

<TERM>:<CAMPUS>:<COURSE-ALPHA>:<COURSE-NUMBER>: (all sections of a course)

<TERM>:<CAMPUS>:<COURSE-ALPHA>: (roughly, all courses for a particular department)

<TERM>:<CAMPUS>: (all enrolled at a particular campus for a particular semester)

<TERM combinations>: (all enrolled across our entire system for a specific semester or academic year)

For the registration hierarchy, there are these 3 groups under EACH of of the above:

 enrolled

 waitlisted

 withdrawn

For the instructor hierarchy, there are these 2 groups under each of the above:

primary instructor

secondary instructor

primary and secondary instructors

One feature that has received a lot of use is our ability to automatically transition a group to reflect Spring, Summer or Fall student enrollment at an appropriate time of the year.  We implement this by using a group attribute that defines the month and day of the month on which these semester transitions should happen.  Then, there is a component that runs once a day to see if it's time to swap the underlying reference groups to the next-semester equivalent of that reference group.

The high-level enrollment groups can be very large, so you may encounter timeouts manipulating groups that use them.  If you are writing code against the Grouper API, be sure to handle timeout exceptions so you can retry the failed operation.  Or use pagination if appropriate.

Our public reference group documentation is here:

https://www.hawaii.edu/bwiki/display/UHIAM/UH+Group+Store

It includes the structure of our reference groups for majors (curriculum folder at the top) in case you're interested.  Those were difficult to construct because of the way that our Banner student information system stores the information.

Good luck!

-julio

University of Hawaii

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 9:37 AM Bill Thompson <> wrote:

Lafayette is working on getting our course rosters into Grouper. If you’ve already done this and have advice/regrets/pointers on things like naming convention, grouper privilege management, exception handling, course roster group lifecycle, etc please let me know.  We are pulling these in as reference groups per the Grouper Deployment Guide. Thanks!

Best,

Bill