[Building Sakai] Request for review, SAK-6792, ability to search external users

[Steve Swinsburg]

Hi all,

I have just completed some work on a long outstanding feature request, which adds some important and useful functionality to the UserDirectoryService API. http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-6792 adds the ability to search externally provided users (ie from LDAP). We, the maintenance team, have discussed this and are seeking your input on this issue since it affects a core service. 

There are two parts: 

The first is a modification to the UserDirectoryService. A new optional interface is added, ExternalUserSearchUDP, containing a single method that a Provider can implement, searchUsers(String criteria, int first, int last). A new method is then added to the UserDirectoryService to surface this new functionality, UserDirectoryService.searchExternalUsers(String criteria, int first, int last).

This phase of the work is complete and a patch is attached to http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-6792 for review. This is completely backwards compatible since the interface is optional and no existing methods have been touched.

The second will be a modification to the JLDAP Provider to implement this new interface and actually do the work of searching for the users in the external directory. This work is about to begin, but relies on the first section above. Other providers can be modified to follow suit if desired.

Comments and feedback appreciated.

thanks,
Steve