Groups with hidden members

[Jari Häkkinen]

Two different types of group in BASe would be useful. Actually there is already two types of groups that supports the functionality I'd like to see; 'Everyone' and the rest. Group Everyone has a trait I'd like to see in other groups, users that are members in group Everyone are not visible to the other group members. For other groups all members can see the other group members.

I suggest that creation of groups where group members are not visible to each other should be possible. The reason for this is that we would like to create groups like 'Illumina', 'Affymetrix', 'CGH', and similar. These groups will allow us to organize users of our facility into different organizational groups. These groups are then used for sharing plug-ins and other items to the members of the groups. In this way only Illumina user will see Illumina only items, Affymetrix users will only see Affymetrix stuff. This can be accomplished today but all members of the different groups will be visibile to everyone else. We want to avoid this.

We use the current group functionality to group users on departmental and research group level. Here we want users to see each other and be able to create projects and share items.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

The EVERYONE groups is very special indeed, because no user is actually a member of it and it is forbidden to manually add users and/or other groups to it. It is only used as a special case when checking permissions.

Implementing a functionality like this would more or less require that #185.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

I am thinking that this may not be impossible after all... I have read my own comment above but I can't figure what it excatly means that it would require #185...

In any case. I think we can simply add a boolean flag to each group (Hidden members). The flag can be checked in the Keyring.loadUsers() method so that only groups with non-hidden members are considered. The simplest way to get the groups with non-hidden members is probably to load this information in the loadGroups() method.

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5077]) Fixes #1182: Groups with hidden members

[Nicklas Nordborg]

(In [5080]) References #1182: Groups with hidden members

Fixed a query problem when a user is not member of any groups.