[Building Sakai] Contact all users in Sakai

[Steve Swinsburg]

Hi Daniel,

There should not be email addresses in the SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP table but  
if user accounts were created with the userId as the eid (ie Guest  
user accounts from Site Info > Add Participants), then it may appear  
that way. Those accounts will also have the email listed in the  
SAKAI_USER table for each user though, so you can rule out  
SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP being a source.

The SAKAI_PERSON_T table backs a user's Profile, and there is no  
guarantee they have filled it out. So that discounts that source as  
well.

The only real source is the SAKAI_USER table and would be the one I  
would use. However, being run over LDAP introduces another issue. You  
say that some appear in there and some don't. My bet is that at some  
point in time, accounts were created in Sakai as well as LDAP or the  
LDAP configuration flag to create accounts in Sakai based on those in  
LDAP was turned on. If they are no longer being synchronised then that  
configuration may have changed. FYI I leave this turned off so only  
the SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP table is populated which links a username from  
LDAP (jsmith26) to an internal account in Sakai (5fef7a2b- 
aca6-4c5b-8bd9-ef82ce9a71c4).

And yes, email addresses are looked up in the fly from LDAP if you  
have it configured that way.

If you can reliably say that all users are in LDAP only, then I'd just  
run a query against LDAP to find all users you need to contact. Most  
LDAP schema's have a field for email, it's generally their official  
email address for an institution so depending on your local policy  
students might not be kept up to date (ie a user might only check  
their Hotmail address, not their official university one)

Note also you could use the web services for this (retrieving user  
email addresses).

As for how I contact users, MOTD puts a message in their user's My  
Workspace which is prominently displayed. There is a function for  
email notification but I have never found that to work. Think I  
remember seeing a Jira about it not doing a lot.

Hope this helps.


cheers,
Steve

---
Steve Swinsburg
Portal Systems Developer
Centre for e-Science
Lancaster University
Lancaster
LA1 4YT

email: s.swinsburg at lancaster.ac.uk
phone: +44 (0) 1524 594870







On 23 Mar 2009, at 14:01, Daniel Lind wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I'm trying to contact all users in a old Sakai installation used  
> during
> our evaluation of the system. We haven't found a funtion for that in  
> the
> web interface so now I'm doing it the SQL way. I've found many
> e-mail-adresses in the tables:
>
> * SAKAI_USER
> * SAKAI_PERSON_T
> * SAKAI_USER_ID_MAP
>
> But when I use the web interface and the "User Membership" function  
> I am
> able to see users not in any of the three tables listed above. We do
> have an active connection to an LDAP server.
>
> Is it possible that the users e-mail-adresses are not stored in Sakai,
> but retreaved from the LDAP server on every lookup? And if so, how  
> come
> most of the users are still stored in Sakai and not retreaved from the
> LDAP, even though they are present in the LDAP. Have I missed any  
> tables
> which may store the users e-mail-adresses?
>
> And maybe the most important question - how do you contact your  
> teachers
> and/or students? Do you use anything other than the MOTD function?
>
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Kind regards,
> Daniel Lind
>
> ------------------------------------------
> Daniel Lind
> UMDAC, Umeå universitet
> 901 87 Umeå Telefon: +46 90 786 53 12
> Daniel.Lind at umdac.umu.se
> ------------------------------------------
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