The Group Provider Exercise is intended to allow partipants to implement a Sakai Group provider against a dummy student information system contained in a database. Since this effort is focused on writing code that doesn't have a UI, one will have to be provided. This takes the form of a Members Tool. The tool displays a list of group/sites accessed from the Group Provider. Each group is a link that shows a membership list along with information about each member (name, etc.) gained via the User Provider. Thus, this one tool can be used to test the development of both Group and User Providers.
Group Provider Functions
The group provider provides the following access functions:
- Get the role of a student in a group.
- Get the student/role pairs for a given group.
- Get the group/role paris for a given user.
- Un pack a group id.
Note that all of these (except the last) are contextualized to a particular student or group.
In the current Sakai environment, sites are pre-populated and flagged to indicate that they are provided for externally. This creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem for writing providers. A method to pre-populate a few Sakai sites may be required to make this work. This should be called out in the presentation notes.