Grouper Working Group Notes of Jan. 19, 2022

  Attending 

  • Chris Hyzer, Penn, Chair
  •  Shilen Patel, Duke
  • Chad Redmon, UNC
  • Carey Black, Purdue
  • Justin Robinson, Indiana University
  • Jonathan Johnson (JJ) , Unicon
  • Emily Eisbruch, Internet2  (scribe)

  

Next Action Item from this call:

  • AI Chris -- take a pass at Grouper menu design with section headers and share that with Justin and U. Indiana


DISCUSSION


 Grouper Menus (Justin Robinson)

  • GRP-3746
    organize group actions menu


  •  It can be hard to find things on Grouper menu
  • Justin asked user experience design expert on team to suggested a new design
  • Groups and members should be collected for common functions
  • Lack of section titles on the drop down menus is an issue 
  • It's possible to put section headed in a drop down menu
  • But there's a real estate issue
  • Menu goes off the screen
  • Chris suggests alphabetizing drop down menus
  • Hard when you have a toggle button and the words change

Principals that Chris implemented and recorded in the Jira, ready for the next release:

  1. Common actions for average users are at top
  2. Templates below that (since that is dynamic, put in own section)
  3. Common actions for admins below that
  4. Other non destructive things
  5. Last - destructive things
  6. Alphabetize each section
  7. Have prefixes to organize actions (e.g. start with Audit log - )

 

  • Chris: this may be a stop gap for now
  • Justin: want to manage things inside Grouper, want to eliminate custom interface system
  • AI Chris will take a pass at Grouper menu design with section headers and share that with Justin and U. Indiana
  • Justin: it’s OK to use iterative direction

 

====

 

JJ, Unicon: some problems with the SQL being generated by hibernate.

  • U Wisc wants tweaks to HQL to create better SQL.
  • This is memberships part of Grouper
  • Change the High 3? Membership bell?? 
  • Remove field? References?
  • 4 are extraneous
  • Oracle 12
  • Field creates cartesian?? product? 
  • Memory usage is an issue
  • Shilen: need to know which queries
  • JJ will create Custom jar for client for testing
  • Chris : this is a bug we should fix in this release
  • JJ will sent Chris the details

 

  • U Wisc also having web service performance problems
  • JJ working on that
  • JJ looked at performance in context of midpoint and Grouper
  • Created document looking at why  web service calls were slow



  • OSGI 
    • https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Grouper+plugins+classpath+OSGI+with+Felix
    •  
    • Java Jar Hell has been a challenge
    • The goal is to have plugins which can have jar dependencies that Grouper would not be dependent on so we do not end up in Java jar hell.
    • The intent is not to do dynamic modules, or modules with dependencies on other modules, just simple classloader separation of jars.
    • We need an interface that the plugin can implement.    if there is an implementation in Grouper that does not need a plugin that is easy as well.  This uses simple javabeans or java types in the interface.


    • Bundle the authentication work
    • Want an OSGI bundle
    • Call it from another project
    • Not have jars in class path of overall project


  • Chad: This approach will be great for provisioners, currently they multiply
  • Grouper image is now large
  • Chris: We will remove some provisioners for Grouper 3.0

 

 

 

Current Work

 

 Vivek

  • Duo roles provisioning
  • Focus on administrators
  •      Can be in 7 roles
  • Two Duo provisioners
  • For less confusing configuration
  • Predefined groups in Grouper
  • Two groups for Duo cannot have the same role
  • Can delegate based on provisioner configuration


  • Chris: recent addition is person attribute resolver
  • Provisioner can pull info from that
  • Person attribute changes may not trigger an incremental sync


  • When we add member name metadata, then these 2 provisioners will encapsulate logic of current DUO provisioner

 

Shilen

  • Adding new columns to grouper members table
  • Two more subject identifier columns and another for email address
  • USDU will keep data in sync
  • Shilen will update loader to use new subject identifier columns

 

Chris

  • Grouper 3.0 DDL changes
  • Grouper Data structure improvements
  • https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Grouper+data+structure+improvements+v3.0
  • Ideas are welcome
  • More tables
  • Reduce storage and memory needed for database to join things together
  • We are wasting space with UUIDs etc
  • Recommend don't use mysql for large deployments
  • Hard to maintain a large software project
  • Need to clean up some areas
  • We are one or two releases behind in hibernate
  • Plan to batch some create functions (create groups)
  • Development effort for 3.0 could take one year
  • Shilen: agree with the approach
  • Hope to make the upgrade as smooth as possible
  • Chris working on failsafe

Chad

  • Working on Grouper Training, starts Feb 8, 2022
  • Screenshots need updating

  • Log4J, set in Grouper source code
  • Has not made change in container, don’t have new tag yet
  • JVM param you can put into the startup
  • Will look for Log4j2 properties file first
  • Then if not found, will look for existing 

 


 

Issue Roundup 

 

Jiras in past two weeks

  

 

 

Grouper Emails in past few weeks

 

 

Grouper wiki updates in past two weeks

  

 

 

Next Grouper Call: Wed Feb 2, 2022

  • No labels