What are UCS@school work groups and classes?
In UCS@school, a school class is a regular user group with a special naming scheme and an additional attribute. Creation and membership is usually maintained by the user import. Manual administration can be done by school admins.
A work group is also a user group. It can be created and modified by teachers to organize users into groups independent of their school classes. Typical use cases are non-curricular clubs, groups including users from multiple classes and other groups that are not managed by the user import. Work groups may also be used as a mailing list as described in the manual.
When creating or modifying a class or work group via UDM command, one can easily miss one of these essential features, which might lead to errors. As with all UCS@school objects, to prevent inconsistencies, classes and work groups should only be modified using the UCS@school UMC modules.
In UCS@school 4.4 v8 work groups and classes are now validated before usage, when loading them from LDAP and errors will be logged to the regular log files (see manual).
In UCS@school 4.4 v9 the diagnostic module UCS@school Consistency Check is introduced. It checks, amongst other things, if existing school groups are consistent. If this diagnostic module displays errors, this does not necessarily mean that the UCS@school system is not working. Rather, it warns of objects that do not look the way UCS@school expects and that could cause future problems when using them.
School name prefix
When creating a school class or a work group, the school name will be prefixed to the group name in order to ensure that the group’s name is unique across the whole domain. For a valid school class or work group name, a school name prefix is required.
Example: school name GS1 and class name 2b result in a group name GS1-2b.
Position in LDAP Tree
School classes and work groups are placed in the following containers in the LDAP tree:
- school class:
cn=klassen,cn=schueler,cn=groups,ou=$SCHOOL,$ldap_base - work group:
cn=schueler,cn=groups,ou=$SCHOOL,$ldap_base
Please note, that the name of the pupils and class container (here cn=schueler and cn=klassen) depend on the UCR-variables ucsschool/ldap/default/container/pupils and ucsschool/ldap/default/container/class respectively.
Role attribute
Like all UCS@school objects, school classes and work groups have an attribute ucsschoolRole, which is managed internally.
For classes the attributes value is: school_class:school:$SCHOOL.
For work groups it is: workgroup:school:$SCHOOL
Example:
$ udm groups/group list --filter cn=DEMOSCHOOL-democlass
DN: cn=DEMOSCHOOL-Democlass,cn=klassen,cn=schueler,cn=groups,ou=DEMOSCHOOL,dc=example,dc=com
name: DEMOSCHOOL-Democlass
ucsschoolRole: school_class:school:DEMOSCHOOL
users: uid=demo_student,cn=schueler,cn=users,ou=DEMOSCHOOL,dc=example,dc=com
...
$ udm groups/group list --filter cn=DEMOSCHOOL-demoworkgroup
DN: cn=DEMOSCHOOL-demoworkgroup,cn=schueler,cn=groups,ou=DEMOSCHOOL,dc=example,dc=com
name: DEMOSCHOOL-demoworkgroup
ucsschoolRole: workgroup:school:DEMOSCHOOL
users: uid=demo_student,cn=schueler,cn=users,ou=DEMOSCHOOL,dc=example,dc=com
...
Shares
Shares simplify the sharing of files within a school class or a work group.
On creation of a school class or a work group, a new share will be created automatically. It will have the same name as the group. For work groups, this can be prevented by deactivating the option Create Share in the UMC module Administrate workgroups. A detailed article about shares can be found here.