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Plugins for Org Units

1 Requirements

In the current implementation of the Org Units in ILIAS, it is only possible to add other Org Units below an existing Org Unit. To change that, a new Plugin Slot for objects in Org Units should be implemented, similar to the Repository Object Slot.

2 Motivation

A plugin slot in the Org Units would give a nice way to offer additional functionality over Org Units that currently can not be located nicely anywhere in ILIAS. As an ordinary tree object, an Org Unit Plugin Object would benefit from being under RBAC. E.g. one could implement a report over the members of some Org Unit, place it in the Org Units where the superiors should have such a report and adjust the permissions on the Report Object accordingly.

3 Additional Information

• Idea / concept: Richard Klees <richard.klees@concepts-and-training.de>
• Interest in funding: YES
• Maintainer: Schmid, Fabian [fschmid]
• Implementation of the feature is done by (will be set by Jour Fixe / maintainer)
• Testcases by: (please add your name if you want to create the testcases for this feature)

4 Discussion

Schmid, Fabian [fschmid] As maintainer we highly appreciate this Feature!

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], May 09, 2016: We see the need for this feature. But before scheduling it we would like to know:

• is the plugin object an org unit or not
• and can this object be renamed to avoid misunderstandings with a real org unit.

Klees, Richard [rklees] I had a talk with Fabian, and we came to the following conclusions:

• The plugin objects should not be org-units. Different types of OUs would be better represented via the already introduced org unit types. 
• The plugin objects rather represent capabilities of an org unit, that members or superiors of the OU can use. So what about "OrgUnit Capability Plugin"?

We also suggest to rename the node "Organisational Unit" in the Administration Menu to "Organisational Structure", as there would be more in the OU-tree than the bare units.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], June 20, 2016: Based on the follow-up by Richard we schedule this feature for 5.2. We support the renaming of the top OU node to 'Organisational Structure'. Instead of 'OrgUnit Capability...' we prefer the name 'Org Unit Extension Plugin'.

5 Implementation

The implementation is done deriving from repository object plugin. The strucutre and API are are almost the same. There are two key differences:

• Import/Export is not yet supported by the OrgUnit Extension
• There are some additional helper methods for orgunit specific tasks:
  • Getting superiors and employees of the current OrgUnit (optionally recursive)
  • Getting the path to the orgunit or getting the subtree.

The documentation can be found here:  http://www.ilias.de/docu/goto_docu_pg_74906_42.html
The example plugin can be foun here: https://github.com/ILIAS-eLearning/TestOrgUnitExtension

Test Cases

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Approval

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