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Grouper will be upgraded in March 2018 so that it returns additional subject attributes:

  • name (same as cn)
  • description (same as cn)
  • uid
  • sn (new, the person's last name)
  • givenName (new, the person's first name)
  • cn (new but redundant with name and description)

You should always check the subjectAttributeNames in the XML/JSON returned by Grouper to determine the order in which the above attributes are returned.  This is usually relevant for API calls such as Get Members or Get Subjects or any API call that returns a subject.

For example, this is the response to a Get Members call where we asked for details (includeSubjectDetail=T) and we specified our own list of attributes (including a bogus one like 'foo'). The top-level subjectAttributeNames gives us the sequence of attributes that are being returned:

<WsGetMembersResults>
 ...
 <subjectAttributeNames>
  <string>name</string>
  <string>description</string>
  <string>foo</string>
  <string>uid</string>
  <string>cn</string>
  <string>sn</string>
  <string>givenName</string>
 </subjectAttributeNames>
...
</WsGetMembersResults>

which should match the order of the attributes in the data for each member returned.  For example:

<WsSubject>
 ... 
 <attributeValues>
  <string>John C Doe</string>  (name)
  <string>John C Doe</string> (description)
  <string></string> (foo)
  <string>johncdoe</string> (uid)
  <string>John C Doe</string> (cn)
  <string>Doe</string> (sn)
  <string>John</string> (givenName)
 </attributeValues>
...
</WsSubject>

In other words, you should never hardcode the list of attributes to expect for each member.  If you've done this in the past, the additional attributes being returned will probably break your code.  Now is a good time to make sure that you are relying on subjectAttributeNames to determine the sequence of attributes to parse for each member.

Note that subjectAttributeNames may include attributes that you didn't explicitly request.  That's why it's so important that you rely on subjectAttributeNames.

For example, prior to this upgrade, the default attributes of name and description are automatically returned and appended for retrieveDetails=T in GetMembersLite and includeSubjectDetail=T in GetMembers.  If you asked for the uid attribute and set includeSubjectDetail=T, you will get back uid, name and details back.  After the upgrade, you will get back uid, cn, sn and givenName for the same query.   It is not feasible to predict the sequence of attributes that will be returned because it depends on several settings: includeSubjectDetail/retrieveDetails, how we configured the Grouper server to append a default set of attributes, and whether you asked for specific attributes in your request.  You don't have to worry about this unpredictability if you simply read subjectAttributeNames.

 

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