Enhancement: Include Connection Attributes in pySEAR Group for Connected Users

[yinjie-z]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Yes, when using pySEAR to retrieve a list of connected users in a group, the returned information does not include the connection attributes. These attributes, which provide detailed information about user connections, are available when retrieving user data individually through a list of group_connections, but they are not included when fetching the group data, which lacks details about user connections. As a result, we need to send a separate request for each connected user to retrieve their detailed connection attributes, which complicates the process.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to see an enhancement to pySEAR that includes connection attributes in the response when retrieving the list of connected users in a group. This would improve the usability and provide developers with comprehensive information about user connections within groups.

Describe alternatives you've considered
As an alternative to modifying pySEAR, I would need to send a separate request for each connected user to obtain their connection attributes. This process is cumbersome and requires multiple requests and additional data processing to retrieve the necessary information. Streamlining this functionality by having the pySEAR provide these attributes directly would significantly enhance usability.

Additional context
Version of pySEAR : 0.5.0

[EmmasBox]

Hm interesting and I see the usefulness of such a change. I will have to investigate whether this is easy to add, if it isn't it might still get added but it will take longer.

[EmmasBox]

I did some quick investigation into this and the reason why it only gives you this amount of information right now is because the underlying HLASM API only forwards this amount of information for a group extract, that doesn't mean it's impossible to add though.

[yinjie-z]

Thanks for your response! I understand that the HLASM API limits the info for group extracts, but I appreciate you looking into adding more detail 😊

In fact, I've been using the pyRACF package, which gives additional information. I noticed that both pySEAR and pyRACF use the same component, IRRSMO00. This might provide some useful clues in pySEAR.

[emmasdb]

Thanks for your response! I understand that the HLASM API limits the info for group extracts, but I appreciate you looking into adding more detail 😊

In fact, I've been using the pyRACF package, which gives additional information. I noticed that both pySEAR and pyRACF use the same component, IRRSMO00. This might provide some useful clues in pySEAR.

RACFu (SEAR before it became a community fork) was meant to be the backend of pyRACF, per the IBMers who worked on these two projects originally. My plan is to resurrect the pyRACF concept, with pySEAR as the backend, though the code will be totally new. Your suggestion might be out of scope for pySEAR, but might become a feature of pyRACF, as the idea behind pyRACF is to be a more abstracted and high level API than pySEAR.

SEAR 0.6.0 will likely deliver some features that makes it easier to build abstracted APIs on top of SEAR, like pyRACF. So it is actively being worked on, but it might take some time. A repository exists for the future MRP version of pyRACF, but no real work on it has been made yet, but feel free to watch it: https://github.com/Mainframe-Renewal-Project/pyracf

(same Emma, just on my work account)

[yinjie-z]

Thank you for the update!

I appreciate the clarification regarding the scope of my suggestion in relation to pySEAR. I’m looking forward to the upcoming features in SEAR 0.6.0 and will keep an eye on the pyRACF repository for future developments.