Package com.bea.netuix.application.communities.invitations

Overview of Community Invitations

See
Description

Interface Summary

InvitationValidationTextGenerator	Provides a mechanism for allowing for customizable implementations of Communities Invitiation passwords.
Invitee	Represents a single Invitee.
InviteeIterator	Implementations of this class are used by the Communities framework to invite multiple users at once via the Invitations mechanism.

Class Summary

Invitation	Represents an invitation stored in the system that has been sent to a single user.
InvitationDetails	Represents information about a Communities invitation operation, including the community that the invitation targets, a small payload that is intended for use as an application specific reference to the invitation action, and several parameters that control the settings of invitation options.
InviteeFactory	Factory for creating new instances of Invitee objects.
SimpleInviteeIterator	SimpleInviteeIterator provides an InviteeIterator implementation that allows developers to collect up a set of Invitee objects one at a time for consumption by the Communities Invitation framework.
SimpleValidationTextGenerator	Simple implementation of InvitationValidationTextGenerator.
UserAndGroupInviteeIterator	Basic convenience class for inviting WLS users and groups to a Community.

Enum Summary

InvitationStatus

Represents the status of a single invitation for the Communtities Invitations framework.

Exception Summary

InviteeIteratorException

Exception thrown from operations from implementations of InviteeIterator.

Package com.bea.netuix.application.communities.invitations Description

Overview of Community Invitations

For a generic overview of all community functionality, see the Community Functionality Overview.

Invitations are messages sent to users to invite them to join a community. Any community may have invitations, but they are necessary for communities which are not public and have public registration disabled-- the only way a user can join such a community is to receive an invitation.

Invitations may be sent out over any messaging system, such as email, instant messenger, portal framework notifications, or any other messaging system by implementing a provided SPI. Email-based and notification-based implementations of this SPI are provided.

When a user receives an invitation, they can go to the community registration page and register to get a membership in the community. Invitations may contain a set of membership capabilities, so that when the user redeems the invitation for a membership they are automatically given the capabilities included in the invitation.

The Invitation object stores the following information:

Attribute	Type	Description
attributes	String names and values	Arbitrary attributes may be stored in the invitation by application code when the invitation is created. These attributes are not used by the portal community framework, so applications may use them as they see fit.
communityID	CommunityDefinitionId	The ID of the community the invitation is for.
creationDate	Timestamp	The time and date the invitation was created.
expirationDate	Timestamp	The time and date the invitation will expire. If null, the invitation will never expire.
fromWlsUserName	String	The user name of the user that sent the invitation.
payload	String	A textual message to the person being invited to the community.
status	InvitationStatus	The status of the invitation. When an invitation is first sent, its status is sent. If nothing is done with the invitation before the specified expiration date, the status is set to expired. If the user receiving the invitation chooses to accept it and join the community, the status is set to accepted; if the user chooses not to join the community the status may be set to rejected. If an administrator chooses to revoke the invitation before the user accepts it the status may be set to revoked.
capabilities	Collection<MembershipCapability>	A set of community capabilities to give to the user if they choose to join the community.
inviteeAddress	String	A string representation of the address (email, IM, etc.) that the invitation was sent to. This can be null if the wlsUserName is not null.
inviteeId	InviteeId	A unique ID for the invitation.
validationText	String	A String token which can act as an authentication mechanism for the invitation. If the invitation is sent to a person who does not currently have a user account (a WLS user name) on the system, this token can be sent along with the invitation message (email, IM, etc.) in the URL to the community registration page for the community the user is invited to. The validation text can be used to indicate that the person attempting to redeem this Invitation object received the invitation message (email, IM, etc.). Validation text is generated by implementations of the InvitationValidationTextGenerator interface, so it may be implemented in any manner deemed necessary.
wlsUserName	String	The WLS user name of the person being invited to join the community, if they already have an account on the system, or null if the user does not have an account on the system or if this is unknown at the time the invitation is created. If this value is null, the inviteeAddress may not be null.

The CommunityInvitationHelper object contains convenience methods for retrieving and sending invitations.