Extending OpenSocial Selectors

[Jesse]

I'm working on standing up an OpenSocial container in a business
environment, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about
adding in some extensions specific to the business. For example, it
would be nice to be able to get all the people in a given users
department, in their division, etc, or all of the activities of people
in a given users department, in their division, etc in the same
fashion as one can currently do for @friends.

Looking at the 0.8.1 REST API docs, I see calls like this for getting
friends and friends activities:

/people/@me/@friends

/activities/@me/@friends

So I'm thinking of extending my container to support additional
selectors like @department and @division -- so then I could make calls
like:

/people/@me/@department

/activities/@me/@department

to get back all the people in the same department as the current user
and the activities of those people.

Having only read through the spec and not really used it for anything
yet, it's hard to be sure I really understand what the best way of
achieving my goal is -- does what I've proposed here seem like a
reasonable way to go about this?

Are there any obvious issues with this approach (aside from the
applications using the extensions being locked to my container)?

Thanks!

--Jesse

[Niels van Dijk]

Hi Jesse,

You may want to have a look a group support for OpenSocial. Groups
can
be used in a more formal sense as compared to friends, so that may
work
for the 'department' scenario. Friends is actually a 'special'
implementation of a group. There are a number of messages in this
list
on group support. I'm not sure however if 0.8 has full support for it
though..

regards,
Niels