On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 21:23, Jean-Vincent Drean <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sep 23, 2010, at 6:14 PM, Jean-Vincent Drean wrote:
2) I read http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/UsersModule and when I read it I miss the feeling that the architecture is sound and all-encompassing. It would be good to know the extent to which this module will go and what it'll do exactly, to be sure we're not missing things and that it's not overstepping in some other module's area. Will it do user registration? Will it allow to add/remove/modify users? What about Groups?
There are many open questions, I've kept the proposal minimalistic on purpose, it's only a starting point. Now from my PoV this module should not handle user management (CRUD), it should be a very generic proxy, for example we can imagine (long-term) an implementation using LDAP that doesn't even create a profile page within the wiki (thus avoiding sync problems).
Then DocumentReference in the User object is not correct... ;)
Indeed :)
Problem is that to really get rid of DocumentReference you would need a complete user manager with user creation, authentication and all so you have to find something in the middle for now i guess. Maybe that's some kind of user related bridge in which you can put things like asking for the DocumentReference related to a User so that the new User API is not polluted.
About groups, I think they should be handled by the user module since they are just sets of users.
3) Would it be possible to not have the number and offset params and instead return a ResultSet<User> object that you could query to get the data with a cursor (same as the JDBC api basically). It makes the API better IMO.
ResultSet cannot replace offset/limit, it's not its job at all. Even in JDBC you set theses in the Query, its only job is to avoid storing the whole set of result in a list when there is too much. But in a UI for example you need to be able to request just between a result and another depending of the pagination without having to get all of them.
ResultSet sounds very RDBM oriented IMHO,
No it's not. It's about anything that returns more than 1 page of data. It's very generic. It allows to have a clean api that doesn't add non business parameters.
I'm not -1 about this, I just find it a bit overkill. It'd also make it a bit more difficult to use from velocity (but may be the script service could hide the complexity).
I'm thinking about the users module as a very minimalistic proxy, a name, a pointer to the user profile (wherever it is, possibly external), possibly a method that allows to authenticate the user in the future.
4) I don't like the "String match" parameter. It's very restrictive. What if I want to search on the phone number of a user? Or simply on its first name only? Also this should probably just call a more generic search module that does search on objects.
Come on Vincent :) do you really search persons by phone number or first name only ? I think mobile phones do a great job at helping to find persons: first name + last name with filtering and a good default ordering (it'd nice to order by last name). I like the approach for its simplicity. I wonder what the others think about this.
I'm very serious. Any design proposal that focus on a specific aspect without allowing more complex use cases it completely flawed to me.
The main target of JV here is not to do a complete user manager but to provide a centralized component accessible way to access the list of "current" users depending of the configuration and since that's something that should go in a (future complete) User Management API he started it. More complex use case means more API in this case so more things to validate. I agree that we will need some generic way of querying any field of users but it can be done later.
I understand that we need to be able to handle custom and complex use cases but I think the XObjects model is here for that. We need a module allowing to retrieve XObjects with matching/filtering on any field, I agree. I think we know enough what we need to manage our users to define a specific API, the rightsmanager API was allowing much more complex things but those capabilities haven't been used (Thomas stop me if I'm wrong). The current proposal will need additions but I don't think it is flawed by design, I'd say it is based on known needs.
About the generic search on objects it only fits with users stored in the wiki.
5) "Define at which level users and groups should be handled in the farm". Not sure what this affects. For example if I want to get all local users, what API do I use?
Why would you ? If it is for maintenance the XWiki.XWikiUsers class page should provide the list but if you're looking for a user profile does it matter that it is stored in the local or the global wiki ?
errr? We're talking about APIs here.... why would I? Simply because there's a notion of local and global users so we need an api to return local users, global users, all users, etc.
There's a notion of local and global wiki pages, but should it matter for user management ?
Whenever you talk specific without being able to do something generic you can be sure your API is flawed and this is my main concern with the proposal: I see it very focused on a single need and IMO it hasn't been thought to be generic. While I'm fine with this we need to know it's going to have to be broken very soon and thus it's not really an API and should be internal instead.
I think we know enough our needs to be able to define a specific API that won't have to be broken.
I don't think we can expect a complete user management API right now especially since it's not a blocker need at all so the most important thing IMO is to find an API that does not block future evolutions even if it produce deprecation of some methods. I'm not sure it would be that soon. Here is a proposal: ResultSet concept is a good idea but we can't use it as it IMO because it's way to SQL oriented. We could define some kind typed Query/Resultset couple for users: UserQuery very minimalistic for now (that we would extends latter with more supported fields and custom fields) - setLimit() - setOffset() - something like setNameMatching(String valueToMatch) that does not block the possibility to add latter support for other fields when we will add more fields in User itself without generating any deprecation, typed make it safer and it's always possible to add setMacthing(String field, Object valueToMatch) latter when we will add support for custom fields in User UserResultSet (to be safe): - same next/previous and close based system than ResultSet - User getUser() and: UserResultSet UserManager#getUsers(UserCriteria criteria) Maybe put the DocumentReference in a bridge like proposed to not constrain User API to be linked to a wiki page to avoid the pain of removing it latter when user manager will contains all user related tasks and will allow us to link it directly to the real user directory like LDAP etc. That way it does not add more work for JV to cover his immediate use case and it's nicer for future evolutions of the API. WDYT ?
Thanks, JV.
It's ok to be minimalistic but it's not ok not to prepare for all the use cases because you'll have to break the api later on.
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks -Vincent
On Sep 17, 2010, at 11:39 AM, Jean-Vincent Drean wrote:
Up!
I could commit the code I have if we agree that it is going in the good direction. I'm thinking about the component implementation proposal in particular: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/UsersModule#HUsersComponent
Thanks, JV.
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Jean-Vincent Drean <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Devs,
I'd like to introduce a new configuration property that would define at which level users should be handled in a farm. See the proposition about the new entry in xwiki.properties, it should be self-explanatory:
--------------------------------8<-------------------------------- #-# [Since 2.5M1] #-# Define at which level users and groups should be handled in the farm. Available modes: #-# #-# mixed (default): #-# - user registration available in the main wiki and local wikis #-# - users from the current wiki and the main wiki will be displayed in the rights interface and user suggests #-# - user administration is present in all the wikis #-# #-# local: #-# - user registration available in the main wiki and local wikis #-# - only users from the current wiki will be displayed in the rights interface and user suggests #-# - user administration is present in all the wikis #-# #-# global: #-# - user registration available in the main wiki only, the register link in local wikis will point to the main wiki #-# - only users from the main wiki will be displayed in the rights interface and user suggests #-# - user administration is present in the main wiki only core.virtual.users=mixed -------------------------------->8--------------------------------
More details are available here: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/UsersModule
WDYT ?
Thanks, JV.
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Thomas Mortagne