Re: [keycloak-dev] groups vs. organizations

I think it is true that an organization is kind of a special case of a Œgroup¹. We had specific requirements for the concept of what amounted to a single group just to bind a few shared attributes between related relying parties (clients). We decided to deliberately push a group concept for Œlater¹ because there are a bunch of complicating factors with groups. One is that groups are often defined in people¹s IdPs (esp. with Active Directory), and the policy for mapping or merging those defs dragged in more complexity than we wanted to do right away. Another is that groups often want to be nested and that¹s again more complexity than we were willing to bite off for so simple a function as an org. To answer your specific question about the specific common set of attributes - if I¹m following your question, we reluctantly call this ¹schema¹ in that it¹s a known, predefined set of attribute keys which can have arbitrary values (and that new attribute keys are not normally added by userland code). We have expectation that defining attributes as enforceable ³schema" (including validation for values) is a feature that will be required for orgs and users but our first cut doesn¹t go that far. So I think that while organizations *could* be implemented as a group with special constraints, it would stretch the abstraction a little too far. Normally, I¹m a Œturtles-all-the-way-down¹ kind of guy, but in this case, I think that org (or tenants) is a valuable concept to exist separate from the idea of a group. In fact, it might come down to an implementation style - from the API/UX perspective, presentation of Œorgs¹ might just be sugar on top of more general graph-style group implementation. On 7/30/15, 3:28 PM, "Bill Burke" <bburke(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: