Groups can be defined based on the domain part of users (verified) email addresses. Email addresses that match one or more groups configuration will add the user to them.
Within the scientific community, in many cases users will use a institutional email address for their account in a Dataverse installation. This might offer a simple solution for building groups of people, as the domain part can be seen as a selector for group membership.
Some use cases: installations that like to avoid Shibboleth, enable self sign up, offer multi-tenancy or can’t use IP Groups plus many more.
Hint
Please be aware that non-verified mail addresses will exclude the user even if matching. This is to avoid privilege escalation.
Mail Domain Groups can be listed with the following curl command:
curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/groups/domain
Let’s say you used “domainGroup1” as the alias of the Mail Domain Group you created below. To list just that Mail Domain Group, you can include the alias in the curl command like this:
curl http://localhost:8080/api/admin/groups/domain/domainGroup1
Mail Domain Groups can be created with a simple JSON file:
{
"name": "Users from @example.org",
"alias": "exampleorg",
"description": "Any verified user from Example Org will be included in this group.",
"domains": ["example.org"]
}
Giving a description is optional. The name will be visible in the permission UI, so be sure to pick a sensible
value.
The domains field is mandatory to be an array. This enables creation of multi-domain groups, too.
Obviously you can create as many of these groups you might like, as long as the alias is unique.
To load it into your Dataverse installation, either use a POST or PUT request (see below):
curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/groups/domain --upload-file domainGroup1.json
Editing a group is done by replacing it. Grab your group definition like the above example,
change it as you like and PUT it into your installation:
curl -X PUT -H 'Content-type: application/json' http://localhost:8080/api/admin/groups/domain/domainGroup1 --upload-file domainGroup1.json
Please make sure that the alias of the group you want to change is included in the path. You also need to ensure that this alias matches with the one given in your JSON file.
Hint
This is an idempotent call, so it will create the group given if not present.
To delete a Mail Domain Group with an alias of “domainGroup1”, use the curl command below:
curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/admin/groups/domain/domainGroup1
Please note: it is not recommended to delete a Mail Domain Group that has been assigned roles. If you want to delete a Mail Domain Group, you should first remove its permissions.