Joining and Leaving Groups

There can be two different workflow for users to join the groups. The first supposes that Charlie is the administrator of a group and Irene wants to join the group. Irene requests the membership of the group. Charlie gets the notification that Irene wants to join. Now, Charlie can accept her group membership or reject the request. Once Charlie has accepted the request, Irene is a member of the group.

In an alternative workflow, Charlie invites Irene to join the group. Irene can reject the invitation or accept it. Once Irene has accepted the invitation, she is a member of the group.

When Irene is a member of the group, she can leave the group. Alternatively, Charlie, being a group administrator, can remove Irene from the group.

Community Engine provides Struts action classes for implementing all these activities of Charlie and Irene described above. A tag library is also provided to show the notifications that Charlie and Irene should receive. For further details on group notifications, see in section Group Notifications.

It is very important that all the group related actions are secured using Community Engine's SecurityFilter (i.e. through configuration rules in security publication resource). Example of rules for securing group membership related actions can be found in security resource file inside the community-demo.war.