The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi,

Lennon Day-Reynolds wrote:

> I've been working on an application for use on our campus to allow  
> users to easily subscribe and unsubscribe from a set of public lists,  
> calling the Sympa SOAP interface from a Ruby on Rails web UI.
>
> In doing so, I've come up against a number of limitations of the  
> current SOAP API, including the extremely limited information about  
> each list made available to SOAP clients. Looking forward, I think  
> our application would benefit greatly from an extended API with  
> several new methods and an enriched 'ListType' that included a number  
> of currently-missing fields -- list owners, description, and  
> subscription policy, to name a few.

This extension would really be of interest. The only restriction is that 
the SOAP server should not deliver sensible information about the list 
(list of members, archives, documents, advanced configuration options) 
to a SOAP client (unless this client acts as a list admin). But the 
information you are listing are not in this category, expect the 
subscription policy maybe.

> Before I begin any major development on this, though, I wanted to  
> gauge the level of interest others (including the Sympa maintainers)  
> would have in such an extension. 

We really do.

> I realize that the SOAP API has been  somewhat of a second-class 
> interface to date, and I don't want to  spend a lot of time and effort 
> trying to enrich it if there simply  isn't going to be demand for it 
> outside our institution.

You're right because the SOAP server only provides a subset of Sympa 
features. The reason is that at the time we designed the SOAP server we 
did not know how much interest it would have...
We have development plans for the SOAP server ; we just lack some 
time/hands to achieve them.
Major development projects are listed here : 
http://www.sympa.org/wiki/doku.php?id=project_direction#soap_related

You're welcome to append your feature request to the wiki.
You're even welcome to send us patches that include these extensions. A 
first step would be the extension of the ListType that also requires 
extension of the WSDL document. Patches should be submitted via our bug 
tracking tool : http://www.sympa.org/mantis

> Alternately, if other people have worked more extensively on driving  
> Sympa installations via external user interfaces, I'd be interested  
> to hear what worked for you.

If required, I suggest that we move this thread to the sympa-dev mailing 
list that is more appropriate...
Sympa users who wish to go on this discussions are welcome to subscribe 
to sympa-dev : http://listes.cru.fr/sympa/info/sympa-dev

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