This provider allows deployments to configure a method to lookup additional data about users. This is aimed at providing candidate numbers associated with users, student numbers, and additional notes about a user that are relevant to someone marking an assessment.
The API that this provider is built upon in in the kernel
and is org.sakaiproject.user.api.CandidateDetailsProvider. This provider
can allow code to lookup details on a user and also to know if it additional
features are enabled for a particular site.
It may well be the case that a deployment doesn't have a CandidateDetailProvider configured and all calling code should cope with the bean not being set. Currently the assignments tool has been updated to use the provider.
In a typical deployment when a user is loaded the additional data about the user's candidate number, student number, and additional notes will also be loaded. This data is then available for the provider to get from the user object when asked. Alternatively the provider can do the lookup for the additional data when asked, if this is the case then some caching may need to be put in place as the current implementation doesn't do any caching as the user objects are well cached.
Currently the example implementation encrypts data it stores on the user object so that if the object is accidentally serialised over HTTP the values that should remain secret aren't exposed. There is an option to not encrypt student numbers.