Site auto-population

Murthy,

There is no out of the box way to auto-populate sites/course or users. The
basic problem comes down to the fact that it is not as simple as dropping
elements into a table.

The out-of-the-box way that is supported is to produce a set of providers
UserDirectoryProvider
CourseManagementProvider
RealmProvider

I have the references in the attached HTML file.

What we really need is a simple set of these providers which read from some
database tables. These would be "new" tables - not any of the existing
Sakai tables.

Once we have the three providers, driven by these new tables, you can simply
fill the new tables and viola - Sakai will be driven by the tables.

In addition to solving FHDA's problems, many others will want to use this
code - I would like this code in 2.0 as a set of example providers as well
which augment our current "very trivial" sample providers.

If you want to really fully create the sites, it is complex - essentially we
need to script WorkSite Setup. There is a lot of code to make Worksite
Setup simple.

Take a look at

~/dev/sakai/chef-tool/src/java/org/sakaiproject/tool/sitesetupgeneric/SiteAc
tion.java

To get a sense of how much complexity there is is making a site.

On the other hand, there is some code (lines 3525 - 3574) which shows how to
call the Site Service API to "clone" a site. While this code is not the
complete solution - if this code were cleverly aligned with the
CourseManagement and Realm providers, we might be able to build a "batch
add".

It would be great to have the core folks write all the code I describe above
but Sakai 2.0 needs the core's full attention until at least the end of
April.

So in the interim, perhaps others can look into and write these elements -
or when we get some caught up in the core go back and make this happen.
Unfortunately your 4/11 date means that you can't wait...

/Chuck

On 3/31/05 7:01 PM, "Murthy Tanniru" <murthy@foothillglobalaccess.org>
wrote:

>> Hi,
>>
>> We at Foothill College are going to pilot on 11th of this month. For this we
>> would like to create about 300 user accounts and more than 100 courses and
>> adding participants to the courses. What is the best way of doing this? We
>> would like to automate this process by batch upload. Should we customize the
>> providers that use the Sakai services? Is so what are the Sakai services we
>> should use to create user accounts, course sites and adding the participants
>> to the course sites? IS there any other way to do this?
>>
>> And we need guidance to setup email for the Sakai.
>>
>> Any help is helpful to us.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Murthy
>>