Suggestion - Update to Google Apps Provisioning API Developer's Guide: .NET

[David McMurray]

Hi,

I've been using the Google Provisioning API since 1.1.3.0 when we were using Email Lists rather than Groups. The Email List methods were deprecated in favour of Groups, but as far as I can tell the .NET developer's guide is misleading when it comes to retrieving group information. I've seen posts from 2009 regarding the mythical GroupFeed object in .NET and either it still hasn't been implemented in the API (or at least I can't find it) or the documentation has been incorrect or at least misleading all this time. For example consider the sections on retrieving a group (AppsService.Groups.RetrieveGroup), all groups for a member (AppsService.Groups.RetrieveGroups) and all groups in a domain (AppsService.Groups.RetrieveAllGroups), the guide states:

"Retrieving a Group
To retrieve information about a group using the .NET client library, call the following method. We assume service is an authenticated AppsService object. This method returns a GroupFeed XML response, which the .NET client library converts to a GroupFeed object."

"Retrieving all Groups for a Member
To retrieve all of the groups that a user is a recipient of, you can call the following method in the .NET client library. We assume service is an authenticated AppsService object. This method returns a GroupFeed XML response, which the .NET client library converts to a GroupFeed object."

"Retrieving all Groups in a Domain
To retrieve all of the groups in a domain, you can call the following method in the .NET client library. We assume service is an authenticated AppsService object. This method returns a GroupFeed XML response, which the .NET client library converts to a GroupFeed object."

This sounds like there should be a Google.<blah blah blah>.GroupFeed type, and if that was the intention then the documentation is incorrect. However if the author intended "GroupFeed object" to refer to a theoretical instance of the actual generic types then I'd say it was misleading.

Also, all of these methods are portrayed as returning the same type which is not the case. Only the RetrieveGroups and RetrieveAllGroups methods return a feed object, more precisely a Google.GData.Apps.AppsExtendedFeed object. The RetrieveGroup method returns a Google.GData.Apps.AppsExtendedEntry object.

So I'm asking if the documentation could be corrected/made clear with respect to these points and perhaps either explain how group information is retrieved from these AppsExtended objects or link to somewhere that does? I'm sure this would help developers in future.

Regards,
David McMurray.

[Shraddha Gupta]

Hello David,

We appreciate you feedback and glad to hear your close work with Google Apps APIs. 

We will update the documentation or the library itself to return the objects as soon as possible, to make it convenient to use. 

Thanks,

Shraddha

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[Claudio Cherubino]

Hi David,

I'm glad to resurrect this old thread to announce that rev. 1140 of the .NET client library addressed your concerns about the implementation of the Groups Provisioning API:

http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/source/detail?r=1140

Methods now return instances of the objects you would expect: GroupEntry, GroupFeed, MemberEntry, MemberFeed, OwnerEntry, OwnerFeed.

The documentation page is going to be updated accordingly in the next few days.

Thanks for your feedback, it was really helpful, and don't hesitate to get in touch with us again for further comments or questions.

Claudio

[David Mcmurray]

Thank you for the update, it’s very encouraging.

 

Although I think I may have mislead you when I mentioned version 1.1.3.0, and apologies if I did. I was merely saying that I have been using the Google Provisioning API’s since that version. Currently we are using version 1.9.0.0 of the .Net library for new applications and I still need to move some current applications to that version as they currently use 1.4.0.2.

 

So will these changes be included in the next version of the API? The issues are still applicable to the later versions are they not?

 

Thank you for all your work on this.

 

Regards,

David McMurray

Developer

Data Services, New College Nottingham

http://www.ncn.ac.uk/content/email_disclaimer.aspx

[Claudio Cherubino]

David,

The changes will definitely be included in the future binary releases of the client library, but you can already get them by checking out the source code from the repository with Subversion and building it yourself:

http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/source/checkout

Please note that some of the changes are not backward-compatible and the Samples solution has not been updated to support the latest changes yet.

Claudio

[David Mcmurray]

Thank you Claudio,

 

I’ll give that a try.

[David Mcmurray]

Hi,

 

I tried getting a read-only copy of the source from the link you gave using the following:

 

svn checkout http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ google-gdata-read-only

 

Both with and without a space after “trunk/” as I though that might have been a typo.

 

But I get the following error:

 

svn: E175013: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk'

svn: E175013: Access to 'http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk' forbidden

 

and the following without the space:

 

svn: E175013: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-gdata-read-only'

svn: E175013: Access to 'http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-gdata-read-only' forbidden

 

Any ideas?

 

Regards,

David McMurray

Developer

Data Services, New College Nottingham

http://www.ncn.ac.uk/content/email_disclaimer.aspx

 

[Shraddha Gupta]

Hello David,

svn checkout http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ google-gdata-read-only, is the correct command.

The URL is http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/  

google-gdata-read-only is the name of the directory where the library will be downloaded. You can choose any other name for it if you want.

I tried checkout, it works for me. If the URL is not correct then the error should be 

URL 'http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-gdata-read-only' doesn't exist

This seems to be SVN error. Please check that out.

Thanks,

Shraddha Gupta

Developer Programs Engineer

Hyderabad, Google India.

[David Mcmurray]

Thank you for the confirmation of the correct command.

 

I found out this was a problem due to our NTLM proxy, I did wonder if that was going to be a problem, but since the error didn’t mention the failed authentication I thought it was an SVN issue. The source is downloading now.

 

Regards,

David McMurray

Developer

Data Services, New College Nottingham

http://www.ncn.ac.uk/content/email_disclaimer.aspx