Hi John,

I've been working under the assumption that VIVO would become an integral part 
of a deployment and would handle all related profile storage and that there 
would be an option to have 'simple' profiles. If we are going down that route I 
don't think that the existing profile service will cover all use cases. But I 
wanted to check on-list to make sure.

I know that some work has been done by writing Freemarker templates in VIVO 
which return JSON, but I haven't been able to track this work down?

Simon

On 7 Aug 2012, at 07:40, John Norman <[email protected]> wrote:

> There is an important architectural principle that needs to be established. 
> Will Sakai run without Vivo? IIRC the profile design work previously assumed 
> that the answer to this must be 'Yes' and Vivo would just be an optional data 
> source. For me the interesting model would be to invert the logic and make 
> the answer 'No'. There might be a minimal profile service bundle that could 
> come with Sakai code, but full functionality would depend on a Vivo 
> installation. We would need to anticipate that institutional deployments of 
> Vivo might pre-exist Sakai and have been customised in our architectural 
> model. I think this is how identity management is handled in some Kuali apps 
> - Kuali Identity Management as a very basic module for testing, but an 
> assumption of integration with a full identity management system for real 
> installations.
> 
> I believe there is work on permissions within the Vivo community, but I have 
> discussed it recently.
> 
> Did you find Yushan's work on a profile widget pulling information out of 
> Vivo?
> 
> HTH
> John
> 
> On 6 Aug 2012, at 22:24, Simon Gaeremynck <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm working on trying to use VIVO [1] as a possible repo to host all our 
>> profile information on. I've been going trough confluence and the 
>> user/profile bundles to determine how it might tie into Sakai and I'm 
>> slightly questioning if the existing codebase would be sufficient to cover 
>> what we need.
>> 
>> Afaict, the (current) way to go is by using KERN-739 [2] which was created 
>> to handle this kind of thing. You can express external data-feeds by setting 
>> the 'sakai:source' property on the authprofile node (or any child thereof) 
>> to external. When you do a request to 
>> ~/simong/public/authprofile.profile.json, it will then trigger your 
>> ProfileProvider implementation which can deal with getting the data from the 
>> external source. This would also require a LiteAuthorizablePostProcessor who 
>> creates that property upon user creation.
>> 
>> I've tried this approach and it does work (ie: I'm able to grab external 
>> data out of VIVO and bring it into sakai) but I'm wondering if this would be 
>> the way to go forward. It doesn't look like it was ever meant to handle full 
>> profiles but rather parts of a profile. ex: only publications are external.
>> I've talked to Ray who has written the persondirectory contrib bundle which 
>> does a similar thing and he seems to be hesitant to use this kind of logic 
>> as it has never been really used (as far as we can tell).
>> 
>> Some factors that might play a role into all of this are:
>> - The ability to ACL certain profile data, this is something that VIVO 
>> doesn't provide (again: afaict) and certainly isn't trivial.
>> - The ability to update profile information from within sakai. This might 
>> need a custom ProfileService impl ?
>> 
>> Has anyone ever done anything like this or has some advice/ideas on what the 
>> best approach would be?
>> 
>> I'll be tracking my work against KERN-3081 [3] if anyone is interested.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> [1] http://vivoweb.org
>> [2] 
>> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/KERNDOC/KERN-739+Dynamic+user+profiles
>> [3] https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/KERN-3081
>> _______________________________________________
>> oae-dev mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/oae-dev
> 
> John Norman
> Director - CARET
> University of Cambridge
> [email protected]
> +44-1223-765367
> 

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