Introduction
This is intended as a reference data point for questions relating to the "most common" or "most heavily used" components of a group service. It represents UW's group service activity from Jan 1 through Jan 27, 2016.
The service's API is mostly described in the swagger doc: UW group service.
A couple of points regrading the usage and resources:
- Everything into or out of the group service goes through the API. There is no behind-the-scenes marshaling of groups or members.
- Group membership is of two types: direct and effective. Effective being all direct members plus all effective members of member groups. The difference is important.
- Direct membership is generally the concern when the group is managed.
- Effective membership is generally the concern when the group is referenced--for authorization, mailing lists, etc.
We use PUT to either create or update a group or its membership.
There was an interesting email thread on the TIER-API list about this data. See subject "group service api usage statistics", January 29, 2016.
Usage statistics for January
action | resource | accesses | rank | comments |
---|---|---|---|---|
get | effective member | 19923850 | 1 | this is a test if an entity is an effective member of a group |
get | effective membership | 4640478 | 2 | I suspect some downstream caching of group membership |
get | group | 3134336 | 3 | some of this is automatic updates of course groups and other institutional groups |
put | group | 2283918 | 4 | ditto |
get | direct membership | 2049067 | 5 |
|
put | direct membership | 999822 | 6 | mostly courses and other automatic, institutional group maintenance |
get | search by effective member | 899308 | 7 | gets all groups by an effective member. Our IdP uses this to populate group membership attributes. |
get | search by stem | 503675 | 8 | one way for people to find all their groups |
get | search by direct member | 367650 | 9 |
|
put | member | 259579 | 10 | adds one or more members to a group |
get | member | 108374 | 11 | test if an entity is a direct member of a group |
delete | member | 89706 | 12 |
|
get | search by name | 22512 | 13 | a way to find groups, allows wildcard characters |
delete | group | 426 | 14 | some people apparently clean up after themselves |
delete | membership | 71 | 15 | starting over I suppose |