A glossary of terms would be very helpful

[tarkatronic]

As I have started working in earnest to get an instance of this project up and running, I've found some of the terminology to be a bit confusing. It would be helpful to have a glossary to help out with this. Some of the confusion I have run into is:

• What is a graph provider?
  • For that matter, what is a graph?
• What is an entity provider?
  • Also, an entity?
  • Entity metadata provider?
• What is a "corporate profile"?
• What is a link provider?

Those are the ones I'm seeing immediately, but I'm sure there are more that would be helpful.

[jeffwilcox]

Joey, I'm with you... I'll see how I can help. In many cases I believe a few targeted if clauses may help avoid situations where certain providers are required today but do not add value in simple cases.

Short answers...

• graph provider: could also be called a "directory" provider... in the Microsoft world, the Microsoft Graph is a graph of things, and most important is the directory/graph of users in the directory: given an employee, for example, the graph answers "what is this user's name/email/identifier", "what is their manager's info", etc.
• entity provider: there's been an evolution of data stores used in this project over the years to work around scale and other things. An entity is just a document/a piece of information, and the entity provider was an attempt to abstract out the underlying data store somewhat, to allow using different storage systems.
• corporate profile ... is this on the /settings page?
• link provider: this is the most important part of the app, it maps a GitHub user ID to a corporate ID

[tarkatronic]

• Graph provider - So this sounds like it could be handled by a generic LDAP or AD backend, yes?
• Entity provider - Is this an entirely internal mechanism then? Basically just an abstraction of the data stored in Postgres? If so, excellent!
• Corporate profile - I'm not entirely sure; I just saw it in the config/ folder and wasn't quite sure what it was about. I haven't gotten to the point yet where I can even see a settings page. 😄
• Link provider - Is this, then, also an abstraction of the Postgres data, similar to the entity provider? If so, then again, score!

(I'm hoping to be able to offer up some actual fixes and not just questions soon. I've even forked the project with the intent of fixing up stumbling blocks I've run into along the path!)

[github-actions]

This issue has been identified as stale because it has gone 30 days with no activity.
The issue will be closed in 10 days. If this is incorrect, simply comment on the issue, or remove the stale label.