[Building Sakai] Remove ability for instructors to assign instructor role to others

[Brian Jones]

Hello,

Our institution required a (configurable) method of restricting what roles
maintainers can assign to existing site members, and for adding new
participants.

We have developed this feature and provided a .patch for the community here:
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-23257

It is already committed to trunk, but on the CLE call this morning it was
decided that it should be floated out to the dev list for analysis,
comments, suggestions, etc.

The use case (for Western), is that our SIS integration defines all roster
members and roles, and we cannot allow maintainers (instructors) the ability
to assign other people as elevated roles (i.e. give someone else the
instructor role).

Our proposed solution to this is to define a set of 'allowed roles' in
sakai.properties, and then both limit the choices on the UI via this
property, and also do a backend check to ensure that the user role being set
is contained in this list of 'allowed roles'.

It was brought up on the CLE call that the Course Management API also
supports this sort of feature, although using the CM API is optional, not
required. Therefore there needs to be another, more general way of
accomplishing this without needing to use the CM API.

Another option suggested was to make this into a permission, but we chose
not to go down this path because a single permission is more of an 'all or
nothing' approach, rather than being configurable on a per-role basis
(especially in a system where there are likely custom roles that are not
provided out of the box).

So, I would like to invite everyone to take a look at this feature/patch.
Are there other institutions that would utilize this feature, or have
similar use cases? Is it acceptable as-is? Any comments, suggestions, etc
are welcome. Feel free to chime in!

Cheers,

Brian Jones
Applications Development
Information Technology Services
Support Services Building, Room 4326
Western University
(519) 661-2111 x86969
bjones86 at uwo.ca