[Building Sakai] unchoosable groups

[Charles Hedrick]

Lessons uses groups to control release of tests, assignments and forum topics. This is used to a kind of conditional release, though the situations used are different than those in the actual conditional release code. Some users object to seeing these groups in “manage groups” and in group-aware tools. The format of the group name is “Access: <assignment name>” though that can now be changed in messages.properties.

I can make groups not appear in Mange Groups by omitting the group_prop_wsetup_created property. But it still appears in group-aware tools.

I am reluctant to do this change at all, since hiding these groups would make difficulties hard to diagnose, but if someone wants it, the most practical approach seems to be another group property, which would make the groups not choosable in group-aware tools. I don’t want to make them completely invisible, since someone looking at a test should probably be able to see that release is controlled by Lessons. Does it make sense to people to add an invisible group property, and supply patches for the group-awrae tools? I’d make this a site.properties setting.

(We do now set a group property anyway, “lessonbuilder_ref”. So we really only need patches to the group-aware tools to not show such groups with this property set if a site.properties setting says not to.