Insert all domain members into Group

Question

I'm currently writing an Add-on to manage Google Groups, and it uses the Admin SDK Directory API to loop through and retrieve all group members and make changes etc.

One curious issue I've found is that when 'All members of the domain' have been added to the group, no member email is supplied. For example, if I retrieve all members of the group, each member will be returned in the format:

  {
   "kind": "admin#directory#member",
   "etag": "\"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV123456789\"",
   "id": "123455678910",
   "email": "email@myDomain.com",
   "role": "MEMBER",
   "type": "USER"
  },

However, if you've added all users within the domain to a group, when you retrieve this 'member', it's returned in the format:

  {
   "kind": "admin#directory#member",
   "etag": "\"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV123456789\"",
   "id": "123455678910",
   "role": "MEMBER",
   "type": "CUSTOMER"
  },

This is fine for retrieval, as I can identify that it's 'All users in the domain' by the 'type' always being 'Customer', then I just give it an arbitrary email address to display in my interface (I'm using '*@domain.com' just because).

However, when I'm updating the group members list using the 'Insert' method, it requires an email Address (It refers to 'memberkey', but I understand that this must be an email address).

It won't accept dummy addresses such as *@domain.com (It returns an error that this particular address exists, so I gues it's in use in the background), and if I use an existing address and try to overwrite the 'type' from 'User' to 'Customer' in an attempt to convert an existing member to the 'All users' value, this doesn't work (I suspect the 'type' field does not allow 'Customer' as a writable field, only a readable one).

My question: There does not seem to be a method to 'Add all users in the domain' to a group neatly, without looping through the domain and literally adding all members one by one. Does this method exist and I've just missed it? Or is there a neater way to add all members to the group without looping through all the members on the domain and adding them to the group one by one?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 10 '15 at 18:04

No API method has existed for this even back into the provisioning API days. Nothing in Group Settings is different for a group of this kind, it seems to be an unsupported Member Resource. Trying to modify existing members to become type: 'CUSTOMER' also fail.

You can, however, set a single group in the Admin Panel UI to be your "All Members" and then use the address of that group as a proxy member. i.e. it is a propagated all member feature. This is a workaround as opposed to a direct answer, but as I state above the real answer is "No".

Insert all domain members into Group

1 Answers1