External Group Providers

Introduction

SURFconext offers Service Providers a REST endpoint to query groups. The platform supports multiple sources for these Groups:

SURFteams
External Group Providers (e.g. groups from institutions or collaborations)

The group memberships of a Person can be used to offer the logged-in user more context in a Service (e.g. in Google show the groups of the user as Google groups, show spaces based on the group memberships in the Confluence wiki or tabs in the Rave portal). Besides offering the logged-in user more context the groups can also be used as a source of authorization:

Either the membership of a certain group is mandatory in order to log in to the Service Provider (this is enforced by SURFconext)
Or the Service Provider uses the group memberships to limit the resources shown to the user (the SURFconext Confluence wiki is an example of this use case).

The SURFconext platform takes care of mapping the identifiers of users coming from IdP and (external) group providers. Service providers receive only one, consistent identifier.

Protocol description

Institutions MUST follow the VOOT protocol when implementing their external group endpoint. The VOOT protocol is an extension of the OpenSocial protocol. The documentation of both the protocols is respectively (VOOT) in draft and (OpenSocial) extensive. For this reason we provide an overview of the relevant parts of the protocol for the institutions on this page.

The external group provider endpoint provided by the institutions (in the remainder of this page referred to as 'endpoint') supports two methods:

Get all groups (memberships) for a certain Person
Get all members for a certain Group

The retrieval of all groups is a HTTP GET to /groups/@me. The /groups/@me will return all the groups for the person who has granted SURFconext access to his groups (using three-legged OAuth 1.0a or Authorization Code Grant OAuth 2.0). The request MUST support the following query parameters:

count
startIndex

The count query parameter is the maximum number of groups to return. The startIndex query parameter indicated how many groups to skip (in order to support pagination). Example GET requests for group retrieval:

https://<institution-domain>/<institution-subdomain>/groups/@me?count=100&startIndex=0;
https://<institution-domain>/social/groups/user124323?count=25&startIndex=50;
https://<institution-domain>/social/groups/@me

If the count and the startIndex are omitted then all the groups will be returned. The institution will respond with the groups in JSON format:

 {
    "startIndex": 0,
    "totalResults": 3,
    "itemsPerPage": 3,
    "entry": [
        {
            "id": "sysadmingroup",
            "title": "sysadmingroup",
            "description": "Super users",
            "voot_membership_role": "admin"
        },
        {
            "id": "demo_sprint_5",
            "title": "demo sprint 5",
            "description": "demo sprint 5",
            "voot_membership_role": "member"
        },
        {
            "id": "femke_1234",
            "title": "Femke 1234",
            "description": "Persoonlijke groep Femke",
            "voot_membership_role": "admin"
        }
    ]
}

The above JSON response example show all the fields that SHOULD be provided:

id (This should be a local unique value)
title
description
voot_membership_role

The following fields MUST be provided:

id
title
voot_membership_role

The retrieval of memberships is a HTTP GET to /people/@me/<group-id>. The /people/@me/<group-id> will return all the members for the group <group-id> using the access token of the person who has granted SURFconext access to his groups. The request MUST support the same query parameters as in the group retrieval query:

count
startIndex

The count query parameter is the maximum number of members to return. The startIndex query parameter indicated how many members to skip (in order to support pagination). Example GET requests for member retrieval:

https://<institution-domain>/<institution-subdomain>/people/@me/<group-id>?count=100&startIndex=0
https://<institution-domain>/social/people/@me/<group-id>?count=25&startIndex=50
https://<institution-domain>/social/people/@me/<group-id>

If the count and the startIndex are omitted then all the members will be returned. The institution will respond with the members in JSON format:

 {
    "startIndex": 0,
    "totalResults": 2,
    "itemsPerPage": 2,
    "entry": [
        {
            "nickname": "Okke Harsta",
            "emails": [
                {
                    "value": "oharsta@zilverline.com",
                    "type": "email"
                }
            ],
            "voot_membership_role": "admin",
            "id": "oharsta",
            "name": {
                "formatted": "Okke Harsta",
                "familyName": "Harsta",
                "givenName": "Okke"
            },
            "tags": [
                "guest"
            ],
            "accounts": [
                {
                    "username": "oharsta",
                    "userId": "oharsta"
                }
            ],
            "organizations": [
                {
                    "name": "surfguest.nl"
                }
            ],
            "displayName": "Okke Harsta"
        },
        {
            "nickname": "Femke Morsch",
            "emails": [
                {
                    "value": "Femke.Morsch@surfnet.nl",
                    "type": "email"
                }
            ],
            "voot_membership_role": "admin",
            "id": "morsch",
            "name": {
                "formatted": "Femke Morsch",
                "familyName": "Morsch",
                "givenName": "Femke"
            },
            "tags": [
                "member"
            ],
            "accounts": [
                {
                    "username": "morsch",
                    "userId": "morsch"
                }
            ],
            "organizations": [
                {
                    "name": "surfnet.nl"
                }
            ],
            "displayName": "Femke Morsch"
        }
    ]
 }

The above JSON response example contains many optional fields. The following fields SHOULD be provided:

id (This should be a local unique value)
name (familyName & givenName)
displayName
1 email
voot_membership_role

The following fields MUST be provided:

id (This should be a local unique value)
displayName
voot_membership_role

For the authentication of the institution's endpoint either 3-legged OAuth version 1.0a or Authorization Code Grant OAuth version 2.0 MUST be supported. For the user experience the provider SHOULD connect the OAuth provider (responsible for creating and granting access tokens after a successful authentication) to SURFconext in order be establish SSO between the Service Provider, SURFconext and the External Group Endpoint.

Example implementations

Clients

Microsoft Sharepoint

Microsoft Sharepoint as a group consumer

Providers

PHP

https://github.com/fkooman/phOAuth - EXPERIMENTAL OAuth v2, only implicit grant profile
https://github.com/fkooman/phpvoot - EXPERIMENTAL Simple SQLite/LDAP backed VOOT group provider (OAuth v2 only, implicit grant only)