I forgot to add to my previous post: I'm using Jonathan Mardsen's OpenACS 4 RPMs,
which seem to be based on a Jan. 14, 2002 CVS snapshot. Red Hat 7.1, PostgreSQL 7.1.3.
AOLServer 3.3 + ad13.
And maybe I need to clarify my original post.
Nope, making a free section a component of a block section won't work.
Let me restate Requirement #2 above:
A user U who joins a free section F which is a component of block section B
but does not explicitly join B should not be made a member of B.
However, according to the ACS documentation (Part 6, ACS Groups Requirements,
of the ACS 4 Kernel Documentation):
50.0 Membership
A party P is a member of group G
- when a direct membership exists between P and G
- or when there exists a direct membership relationship between P and
some group Gc and Gc has a composition relationship with G
So the fairly obvious way of using component groups will not work.
Another fairly obvious solution is to create my own user-group mapping,
which I do not want to do. My hunch is that the problem I face
is a common one, and either:
- veterans in the community have implemented
relationship mappings similar to the one I'm trying to create
using the Groups API, and I just don't understand the API enough, or
- the Groups API lacks the support for these kinds of relationships,
which means we have some more work to do...
I think #1 is more probable than #2, which is why I asked first instead of going directly to add code and salt and pepper...
