sTeam allows the creation of groups and joining, leaving and listing them. However these functions were only available in the web interface. My task involved the addition of these functions to the command line interface, that is, steam-shell. The task sounded like a difficult one because it involved coding out new commands for the shell and perform actions that have never been done before from the shell. This didn’t turn out to be true.

Issue: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/issues/68

I began with using and understanding the group functions from the web interface. First I took up the command for the creation of groups. I listed the attributes needed by referring the web interface and then extended the create command already present in the shell to also create groups. The task turned out to be easy against what I thought earlier. This was because of the elegance of pike and modularity of the sTeam server. The code for creation of object was already present in the command and I had to pass the type of object that is group and write a few lines to accept the attributes required.

Next command was for the listing of groups, for this I created a new command called ‘group’ and inside the function called by group I switch cased on the next sub-command to find out if it was join, leave or list. After that I wrote the code to perform the action for each command in their respective cases. This is where the modularity of sTeam helped me a lot. The core portion of these functions turned out to be one liners.

Code to get a list of all groups:

array(object) groups = _Server->get_module(“groups”)->get_groups();

Code to join a group:

int result = group->add_member(me);

Code to leave a group:

group->remove_member(me);

Soon all my command were ready. I tested these and everything seemed to be working fine. I pushed my changes and created a new pull request. It was after this that Martin asked me to change the interface. He introduced me to MUDs, Multi User Dungeon. MUDs are type of text based games. The interface for sTeam is based on the these games and these are also an inspiration for the entire project. Just like MUDs create a virtual space we at sTeam create a virtual office space. This helped me to understand not only the interface but also the project. I will be talking more about this in my next blog. Anyways the standard interface is

<action> <object> <additional attributes>

I changed the interface and now the syntax for the commands are

Create a group: create group <group_name>

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> create group group_test
 How would you describe it?^Jtest group
 Subgroup of?^J
 /home/root>

List groups: list groups

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> list groups


Here is a list of all groups
abcd Admin coder Everyone Groups group_test
help justnow PrivGroups sTeam testg testg;
testGroup testing test_group WikiGroups

 /home/root>
 

Join a group: join group <group_name>

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> join group group_test
 Joined group group_test
 /home/root>
 

Leave a group: leave group <group_name>

 siddhant@omega:~/Documents/sTeam/tools$ ./steam-shell.pike
 Connecting to sTeam server...
 Password for root@127.0.0.1 [steam]: *****
 Pike v7.8 release 866 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
 /home/root> leave group group_test
 /home/root>
 

Solution: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/pull/77