Hi Folks,

I've read a number of posts here on the difficulties of integrating third party modules with groups, as most modules don't know about groupids only userids. I know my solution is not very elegant, and I'm sure it has some potential issues, but I thought I would share what I've decided to go with in case others need a new idea. You can see a sample of my groups including videos from UVG here: http://www.neighbay.ca/groups/gord-...ship/media
(the videos are listed below the photos)

First, I downloaded a copy of Open Web Studio (OWS) (free). This is a really powerful tool if you can wade through some initial frustration until it starts to make sense. I then add a copy of the module to a page and start the administration tool. I created a very basic routine to query the group owners id and then look up the records associated with that member in the third party module. For the purposes of this code sample I am loading data from UVG but you can apply this to Ventrian modules as well as others.

OWS let you create a template right in your code to display the data anyway you'd like. You can turn on debugging in OWS until you get your code running smoothly. In the sample below I get the Ownerid for the groups table and then use this to find any videos posted by the groups owner. You could modify this technique to get the videos of all members of a group as well.

I know the code below looks crazy, but all I did was use the export function in OWS so that I could post it here. In reality this code turns into some nicely ordered and very simple steps in OWS when you import it. (Click on import in the Administration tool and paste in the code to get started)



After you import that code and modify it the way you wish, click publish. Then go to the page on which you placed the module and use "settings" to associate the module with the code configuration you made using the administration tool. Get the tab and module id for the OWS module and use it to load it into a tab using the moduleloader method that is well documented on AS. That's it.

The General tab in the Administrator tool in OWS contains methods of controlling paging so you can pick and choose the options you want. I know this is a quick and dirty version but you might find it provides a method you can modify to suit your purposes.

I can't say I'm much of an expert in using OWS but I have spent a bit of time with it and I can answer some very basic questions regarding the configuration and the general functions. The forums at OWS are well-supported if you have programming questions.