[Building Sakai] Question about some EB providers

[Maurer, Christopher Wayne]

We're working on building out some functionality for message center here at IU to allow for use on mobile devices and have run into a couple of issues related to the entity broker providers.

First, in the MembershipEntityProvider, it eventually finds it's way down to the getMembers method, and I'm failing the isAllowedAccessMembers check.  Under normal circumstances, this is correct cause this user (student, etc) can't see the site roster, but in the case of message center, the user needs to see a list of users to send messages to.  Is there some other way to get at this information through EB?  I don't feel that good about creating a new method that skips the perm check, cause I don't want to open the door for people to get at data they aren't supposed to.

Secondly, (this probably is only an issue on my local instance with the sample provider enabled, but I'd like to be sure), if I have a user in a site that comes from the sample provider, when the code gets to UserEntityProvider.getUserByIdEid(), the UDS can find no user.  Most everything else seems to handle the sample users OK (that I've seen).  Is this anything that I should be concerned about?

Any suggestions on either of these issues would be great!  Thanks.

We're running 2.6-ish.  We patch and customize lots of stuff, so it's hard to say what version it is!

Chris