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:

  1. Everything into or out of the group service goes through the API.  There is no behind-the-scenes marshaling of groups or members.
  2. 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.
    1. Direct membership is generally the concern when the group is managed.
    2. Effective membership is generally the concern when the group is referenced--for authorization, mailing lists, etc.

  3. 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

 

 

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