Sometimes I get the feeling the powers at be are not giving the IBM developers quite the time they need to document stuff, IBM Connections is the best example of it I know, take this sterling example of how to add a member programmatically and even if they have slightly better versions such as this they are not a patch on the notes ones, so every time I hit one and end up solving it my self I thought I would do a proper guide
Note: all of my documentation assumes the worst case scenario that I can think off which in this case is to have the “emails not visible” setting on, which means the Atom feeds will NOT accept email address as parameters, if you need to get the userid for Atom is this is the case you can get it with this function
The Atom ‘add user’ and search functions detailed later CAN take an email address, but as IBM always give you best case scenarios, I’m giving you a worst case one.
Oh, shout out to Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg at http://lekkimworld.com/ who is the connections god, and pointed me in the right direction when I was having a head bashing moment on a custom names space issue for this.
Right so we want to add a user to a restricted community in IBM connections and we want to do this via the atoms feeds, the minimum XML I have found that you need to add a new user to a community is this
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:snx="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn">
<contributor>
<snx:userid xmlns:snx="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn">A5B8C712-27E5-596C-8625-7AC4000743C3</snx:userid>
</contributor>
</entry>
It assumes you are adding them as a member, you submit this to the community member list url, which will be a bit like this
http://www.connectionssite.com/communities/service/atom/community/members?communityUuid=XXXXXXXXXXXX
where XXXXXXXXXXXX is the community ID which will be a string like this “c1l2a2e6-2e72-4a25-9a2f-l76e046a0d53”.
OK then we need a function to do this
private String addUserAsAMemberofThisCommunity(String CommunityUnid, String adminUserName, String adminPassword, String baseURL, String memberlistURL, String UserIDtoAdd) throws NotesException {
//Example parameters
CommunityUnid = "c1l2a2e6-2e72-4a25-9a2f-l76e046a0d53";
adminUserName = "Admin";
adminPassword = "password";
baseURL = "http://www.myconnections.com";
memberlistURL = "/communities/service/atom/community/members?communityUuid=";
UserIDtoAdd = "A7B2C512-27E5-596C-8625-7AD4000843Z3";
String ErrorReturn = "";
try {
//just incase some has passed the default user name for an Anonymous user
if (!UserIDtoAdd.equals("Anonymous")) {
Abdera abdera = new Abdera();
AbderaClient client = new AbderaClient(abdera);
AbderaClient.registerTrustManager();
client.addCredentials(baseURL, null, null, new UsernamePasswordCredentials(adminUserName, adminPassword));
Entry entry = abdera.newEntry();
//thanks to Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg for telling me about this as i was doing it wrong
javax.xml.namespace.QName contributornamespace = new QName("http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom", "contributor", "");
javax.xml.namespace.QName useridnamespace = new QName("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn", "userid", "snx");
ExtensibleElement contributorElement = entry.addExtension(contributornamespace);
ExtensibleElement useridElement = contributorElement.addExtension(useridnamespace);
useridElement.setText(UserIDtoAdd);
ClientResponse response = client.post(baseURL + memberlistURL + CommunityUnid, entry);
if (response.getStatus() != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED) {
ErrorReturn = "The User Id you are useing is noth athorised to do this";
} else if (response.getStatus() != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_TEMP) {
ErrorReturn = "You are most likly using a none ssl url to do this and connections wants a ssl link";
} else if (response.getStatus() != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_CREATED && response.getStatus() != HttpURLConnection.HTTP_CONFLICT) {
ErrorReturn = "We could not add the user to the community automatically, it returned a status of: " + response.getStatus();
}
}
} catch (ClassCastException e) {
ErrorReturn = "Unknown Error: most likly the web service failed to respond";
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return ErrorReturn;
}
Well that works just fine, job done right?
yeahhhhh…..not quite
In Connections, if a restricted community is a subgroup of another community, you have to add the user to all the sub communities before you can add them to this one (RUDE WORD)
so we have to work out how to see if a community has a parent community, which we can do with this happy function
private String getParentLink(String CommunityUnid, String baseURL, String adminUserName, String adminPassword, String communityInstance) throws NotesException {
//Example parameters
CommunityUnid = "c1l2a2e6-2e72-4a25-9a2f-l76e046a0d53";
adminUserName = "Admin";
adminPassword = "password";
baseURL = "http://www.myconnections.com";
communityInstance = "/communities/service/atom/community/instance?communityUuid=";
String parentLink = "";
try {
URL feedUrl = new URL(baseURL + communityInstance + CommunityUnid);
Abdera abdera = new Abdera();
Parser parser = abdera.getParser();
XPath xpath = abdera.getXPath();
AbderaClient client = new AbderaClient(abdera);
AbderaClient.registerTrustManager();
client.addCredentials(baseURL, null, null, new UsernamePasswordCredentials(adminUserName, adminPassword));
ClientResponse resp = client.get(baseURL + communityInstance + CommunityUnid);
org.apache.abdera.model.Document<Feed> doc = resp.getDocument();
//this is not a normal entry based document it is a FOMEntry, so we have to caste it to that
FOMEntry feed = (FOMEntry) doc.getRoot();
//and we are not after a atom item we are after a link in the xml document this link is identified by its 'rel' attibute
if (null != feed.getLink("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/parentcommunity") || feed.getLink("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/parentcommunity").getHref().toString().equals("")) {
parentLink = feed.getLink("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/parentcommunity").getHref().toString();
HashMap restrictedParm = getURLParameters(parentLink);
parentLink = restrictedParm.get("communityUuid").toString();
}
} catch (Exception e) {
//e.printStackTrace();
}
return parentLink;
}
We can then gather this all together into one function that will do the check for nested communities and add the user to all of them in the right order
private String addtoAllSubCommunites(String CommunityUnid, String adminUserName, String adminPassword, String baseURL, String memberlistURL, String UserIDtoAdd, String communityInstance) throws NotesException {
//Example parameters
CommunityUnid = "c1l2a2e6-2e72-4a25-9a2f-l76e046a0d53";
adminUserName = "Admin";
adminPassword = "password";
baseURL = "http://www.myconnections.com";
memberlistURL = "/communities/service/atom/community/members?communityUuid=";
UserIDtoAdd = "A7B2C512-27E5-596C-8625-7AD4000843Z3";
communityInstance = "/communities/service/atom/community/instance?communityUuid=";
String ErrorReturn = "";
try {
List communityList = new ArrayList();
communityList.add(CommunityUnid);
//lets see if this community is a member of another community
String parentCommunityUnid = getParentLink(CommunityUnid, baseURL, adminUserName, adminPassword, communityInstance);
if (parentCommunityUnid.equals("")) {
ErrorReturn = addUserAsAMemberofThisCommunity(CommunityUnid, adminUserName, adminPassword, baseURL, memberlistURL, UserIDtoAdd);
} else {
//in case there are multiple nested communities, lets recurse down and get them all
while (!parentCommunityUnid.equals("")) {
communityList.add(parentCommunityUnid);
parentCommunityUnid = getParentLink(parentCommunityUnid, baseURL, adminUserName, adminPassword, communityInstance);
}
//reverse the list of parent communities as we have to add the from the root upwards
Collections.reverse(communityList);
//now we can finaly add the user as a member of all the communities in the right order
for (int i = 0; i < communityList.size(); i++) {
String tempparunid = communityList.get(i).toString();
ErrorReturn = addUserAsAMemberofThisCommunity(tempparunid, adminUserName, adminPassword, baseURL, memberlistURL, UserIDtoAdd);
}
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return ErrorReturn;
}
There you go, I don’t know about you but it seems a lot of work just to add a user.
hope it helps.
