Programmer's Guide:
Using Communities

What is a Community?

An eRoom community is the center of administration and access for a set of facilities and eRooms. Each community is responsible for many high-level tasks, such as:

• Managing a list of members and authenticating members when they attempt to log into the community.

• Managing licenses, which legitimize those members.

• Keeping track of the eRooms within the community and presenting a customized directory of those rooms to users.

• Coordinating its member list with external user directories.

SAAPI programs interact with community objects through their IERUCommunity  interface. Common tasks include generating reports that contain member information, populating the member list based on information retrieved from another source, and creating new Rooms.

Opening a Community from a Community Manager

To get a community from a community Manager, use the GetCommunity or GetCommunityByID methods, defined in the IERUCommunityManager interface:

Dim App
Dim CMgr IERUCommunityManager
Dim Cmty IERUCommunity
Set App = CreateObject("eRoom.Application")
Set CMgr = App.Site.CommunityManager
' Simple way, using GetCommunity (By Name)
Set Cmty = CMgr.GetCommunity("mycommunity")
' Alternate way, using GetFacilityByID with Community ID
Set Cmty = CMgr.GetCommunityByID(5)
' Get a community with internal id of 5

Note that the Community Manager allows you to retrieve a community by specifying a community name with the GetCommunity method, but also allows you to retrieve a community by specifying a Community ID with the GetCommunityByID method.

Community Membership

One of a community's primary responsibilities is to manage a list of members. In eRoom, member refers generically to users and groups. A user is a named individual; a group is a named collection of users or other groups.

The members of a community form a pool from which room coordinators can draw when they add members to their rooms. All room members are members of the community that contains the room, but not all community members are members of all rooms in the facility. In fact, some members of the community may not be members of any rooms in the community.

To work with the members of a community, use the methods and properties of the IERUMemberManager interface of the community object.

Settings for Community Administrator Privileges

The IERUPermissionManager interface contains several properties that set privileges for community administrators. In addition, the IERUCommunityManager interface also contains properties that allow you to specify default settings for new community members.

Turning off notification of changes

Another community administrative option is to control whether members can monitor changes in email change reports. Normally, the only reason to turn this feature off is to improve performance on a slow server with a large number of members and eRooms on it. The AllowEmailNotification property is on the IERUCommunitySettings interface.

External directories

Communities can be associated with external directory services, such as NT domains or LDAP directories. This allows "bulk importing" and scheduled updating of the community's member list from the associated directory.

To associate a community with an external directory, you set the directory Type and DirectoryName properties of a Directory Connection object. By default, directory Type is initialized to erDirTypeNone. To connect to an NT domain, set it to erDirTypeNTDomain. Then set DirectoryName to the name of your NT domain. To connect to the Server Member List, set DirectoryType to erDirTypeServerMemberList. To connect to an LDAP directory, set DirectoryType to erDirTypeLDAP. To connect to multiple external directory types, set DirectoryType to erDirTypeMultiple.