library hierarchical-group-email

westkingdom/hierarchical-group-email

The Hierarchical Group Email library utilizes the Google Apps API to manage the membership lists for Google Groups. Additional email forwards are automatically created for collections of groups, making it possible to email all of the groups in a branch, or all of the same group type in every branch.

Contents

1. Hierarchical Group Mailing List Management
2. Running the Tests
3. Basic Example
   1. Include this Library Using Composer
   2. Configuring Your Authentication Information
   3. Prepare Your Data
4. Expanded Example
   1. Create a Service Authenticator
   2. Authenticate
   3. Create a Standard Group Policy
   4. Create a Google Apps Group Controller
   5. Create a Groups Object and Update It
   6. Debugging, logging or prompting

Group Management

This library assists in the management of mailing lists for hierarchical groups. It is presumed that group memberships themselves will be managed in some external system (e.g. Drupal); the mailing lists themselves are created as Google Groups within a Google Groups for Business (or Nonprofits, or Education) account., _(*1)

The assumption is that the group heirarchies are organized by regions (for example, State, County and City); each region is called a "branch". Each branch has a number of offices, and each office can have multiple officers (e.g. the office holder and assistants, jointly-held offices, and so on). Every branch office is a group, and every group has exactly one email list. If an office requires multiple lists, this can be accomplished by creating sub-offices, as the offices can be hierarchical as well. This is only necessary when the group membership for each list needs to be vary, though, as every mailing list can have any number of alternate addressess, any of which can be used to send mail to the list., _(*2)

Updates to groups are made in bulk. The update process goes something like this:, _(*3)

• Membership data is provided via a PHP associative array that defines the group names and member email addresses.
• It is expected that the caller will also provide a similar array, containing a cached representation of the group membership data from the last time an update was made.
• The update function in this class will then call the Google API to make any necessary additions or deletions from the group membership lists.

When the update function runs, it will create, update and remove groups and group memberships as needed in order to make the Google Groups memberships exactly match the memberships described in the provided input arrays. In addition to these groups, a number of "aggregate" groups are also automatically created at the same time. An "aggregate" group is a group whose members are entirely composed of other groups. There are three kinds of aggregate groups created:, _(*4)

• All officers of a type: An aggregated list is created for every unique type of officer in the system. For example, a "presidents" list is created to address all of the presidents of every branch.
• Branch officers: An aggregated list is created for every branch in the system. This "officers" list will send email to every officer in that branch.
• Custom aggregated lists: The caller can define collections of officers that can be messaged at a single address. For example, an "executive" group could be defined to contain the president, finance officer and secretary; in this instance, every branch would be given an "executive" mailing list that would send email to these officers.

These aggregate groups will be managed automatically., _(*5)

Running the Tests

This library contains a test suite that uses PHPUnit and Prophecy to insure that the classes provided here are correct. The tests exercise the Google Apps APIs, but do not make any calls to Google, so it is not necessary to set up any authentication credentials just to run the tests., _(*6)

1. Clone this repository
2. Run composer install
3. Run ./vendor/bin/phpunit tests

All of the tests are also run by Travis CI on every commit., _(*7)

Basic Example

If you follow the instructions in the following sections, code similar to the basic overview shown below should work., _(*8)

use Westkingdom\HierarchicalGroupEmail\GroupsManager;

$groupsManager = GroupsManager::createForDomain('My application', 'mydomain.org', $currentState);
$currentState = $groupsManager->update($newState);

Even if you use this simple form, you need to understand how this API searches for and uses your authentication data, and how to manage the state of your data. See below for more details on how this works., _(*9)

Composer Instructions

The best way to install this library in your application is to use Composer. Simply add the following line to your composer.json file's require section:, _(*10)

{
  "require": {
    "westkingdom/hierarchical-group-email": "~1"
  }
}

To use Composer with popular content management systems, please see the following resources:, _(*11)

• Drupal: Composer Generate
• Joomla: Getting Started with Composer and Joomla!
• Wordpress: Using Composer with WordPress

Of course, it is possible to use this library without composer; you just need to be responsible for setting up the autoloader, or including the class files yourself. However, using Composer is strongly recommended., _(*12)

Configuring Your Authentication Information

Follow the authorization information setup instructions on the documentation website., _(*13)

Prepare Your Data

This library expects you to accumulate all of the information about all of your groups, and their memberships in a nested heirarchical array., _(*14)

The structure is shown below in yaml, but you may store it in whatever format is most convenient for your application., _(*15)

GROUPNAME:
  lists:
    OFFICENAME:
      members:
        - user1@domain1.org
        - user2@domain2.org
      properties:
        group-name: 'Full name of Office'
  subgroups:
    - subgroup1
    - subgroup2
    - subgroup3

Just repeat this structure for as many groups as you have. If your groups are heirarchical in nature, just name the "child" groups in each group's "subgroup" section. The names listed should exaclty match the "GROUPNAME" used as the key for the group's data., _(*16)

Note also that it is the responsibility of the caller to keep track of the current state and the new state. The group manager will send updates for just the changes that occure in the new state compared to the old state. If you do not provide the current state, then groups will never be deleted, and group members will never be removed., _(*17)

Future: The group manager could provide an "export" function to build the current state of the groups by calling the Google API., _(*18)

Expanded Example

If you would like more control over what happens in an update, you can construct the internal classes yourself and modify them before making your GroupsManager., _(*19)

use Westkingdom\HierarchicalGroupEmail\ServiceAccountAuthenticator;
use Westkingdom\HierarchicalGroupEmail\StandardGroupPolicy;
use Westkingdom\HierarchicalGroupEmail\GoogleAppsGroupsController;
use Westkingdom\HierarchicalGroupEmail\GroupsManager;

$authenticator = ServiceAccountAuthenticator("My application");
$client = $authenticator->authenticate();
$policy = new StandardGroupPolicy('mydomain.org', $properties);
$controller = new GoogleAppsGroupsController($client);
$groupManager = new GroupsManager($controller, $policy, $currentState);
$currentState = $groupManager->update($newState);

Note: If you also want to control the behavior of the batch operations, you can provide a batch object to the GoogleAppsGroupsController constructor. See below for details., _(*20)

Create a Service Authenticator

A service authenticator will help your application load its authentication credential information from well-known files, so they do not need to be hard-coded in the application source code., _(*21)

$authenticator = ServiceAccountAuthenticator("My application", $searchpath);, _(*22)

"My application" is the name of your application; this will be passed to any Google_Client created by the authenticator., _(*23)

$searchpath is an array of paths to search for authentication files. Relative paths are resolved relative to the current user's home directory. The default searchpath is:, _(*24)

• .google-api
• /etc/google-api

Authenticate

$client = $authenticator->authenticate($serviceAccount, $scopes, $serviceToken);, _(*25)

Create a Standard Group Policy

$policy = new StandardGroupPolicy('mydomain.org', $properties);, _(*26)

'mydomain.org' is the base domain for your Google Apps account. $properties contain default values for properties used by the policy. See below for a list of the different properties that can be set to customize the operation of the library., _(*27)

Create a Google Apps Group Controller

The Google Apps Group Controller is the object that actually talks to the Google API. Batch mode is always used; you can manage the batch object yourself, as shown below:, _(*28)

$batch = new \Google_Http_Batch($client);
$controller = new GoogleAppsGroupsController($client, $policy, $batch);
$groupManager = new GroupsManager($controller, $currentState);
...
// When finished:
$groupManager->execute();

If you do not want to manage the batch object, just leave off those lines, and the contorller will create and execute batches as needed. This is the preferred method of operation; for example, the controller will try to arrange to run the batch commands to create new groups before it runs any of the commands to add members to a group; this makes it more likely that the batch commands will complete successfuly., _(*29)

Create a Groups Object and Update It

The Groups object is responsible for evaluating how the new state differs from the current state. It then instructs the controller to make whatever changes are necessary to update the current state to match the new state., _(*30)

$groupManager = new Groups($controller, $currentState);
$groupManager->update($newState);

Changes are always made in batch mode. Batch mode can be handled for you, or you can control it yourself, as shown in the previous section., _(*31)

Debugging, Logging or Prompting

If you'd like to know what the GroupManager is going to do before it does it, you can use a BatchWrapper object., _(*32)

use Westkingdom\HierarchicalGroupEmail\BatchWrapper;

$client->setUseBatch(true);
$batch = new \Google_Http_Batch($client);
$batchWrapper = new BatchWrapper($batch);
$controller = new GoogleAppsGroupsController($client, $policy, $batch);
...
// To log or prompt or whatever:
$operationList = $batchWrapper->getSimplifiedRequests();

// When finished:
$batchWrapper->execute();

If you are only reporting / debugging, it is not necessary to create the Google_Http_Batch at all; you can just use the BatchWrapper by itself., _(*33)

Property Directory

Properties can contain replacements, which come in two forms., _(*34)

• $(var): Substitutes the all-lowercase form of the variable
• ${var}: Substitutes the variable name