A PHP script to extract membership from a Jive Cloud Instance using the REST API
For JIVE cloud users, a frequently asked question is how to extract the JIVE membership list.
Working with a client implementing Jive, I came up against this same problem. In our case we wanted to generate statistics about our membership based on custom fields we had added to Jive. While the JIVE web interface is excellent for viewing membership, there is no mechanism to download your membership into a CSV file. Trying to generate metrics about how users answered questions in their profiles was tedious when we had a few users, but became pretty much impossible as our membership exceeded 1,000.
The only way to extract and analyze membership in a manner that scales (so far as I know) is to use the Jive REST API.
Different JIVE users will have different needs - I just wanted to share an example as a starting point.
This script is dumbed down considerably from the script we are actually using in production, but we are analyzing fields specific to our use of Jive. This sanitized version of the script shows how the problem is solved without sharing details specific to our implementation.
##Try it Live
If you want to quickly try this script against your own Jive instance, you can test it at this URL:
https://e42fb64d.servage-customer.net/jive_metrics/index.php
By the way - if you're like me I would never punch my URL and administrator credentials into a website. The script does not store your credentials but I completely respect people who decide not to trust this. (I wouldn't). I host this script nonetheless because people who I know find it convenient (as do I). The more responsible approach I acknowledge is to read on and host the same script yourself on your own web-server so you can be sure things are legit.
##About the scripts
The simple solution involves two PHP scripts.
- index.php - Presents a screen requesting login credentials and the Jive site URL
- get_membership.php - The back-end script called by index.php that calls the Jive REST API with the credentials provided.
##Prerequisites
To run these scripts you will need a web server that supports PHP. I've tested this on a Linux host only but I believe it should run fine on a Windows PHP server as well. Safe mode will need to be turned off on your server. If you are not sure whether Safemode is enabled on your PHP server, you can embed this test in your web page to test it:
<?php
if ( ini_get('safe_mode') ){
echo 'Safe mode is on';
} else {
echo 'Safe mode is off';//
}
?>
In our case, we embedded this script from within a Jive HTML tile. Whether you are running with native URLs in Jive Cloud or vanity URLs I believe all Jive URLs are protected by SSL - to reference external content in an iFrame, it needs to be SSL protected as well so you will need to host this script in a manner that it is accessible only via SSL if you plan to call it from within your Jive instance.
If you are going to access the script from outside of Jive no worries - it will work fine.
I'm fond of Servage.NET as a shared hosting provider because they allow the use of a shared SSL certificate that prevents me needing to purchase a certification whenever I want to test an SSL enabled website like this one.
##The user experience
After you upload the two script files, access them through your browser. You will see a screen like the one below
After you submit valid credentials a progress bar is displayed and updated as each call to the Jive API is made. This is necessary because the Jive API only allows 100 rows to be retrieved at one time.
This one is kind of a long story.
Once the script is convinced it has retrieved all the rows via the Jive API, a table is presented that renders the associative array. This table could just as easily write a CSV file on the server and present it for download.
An image of the first few rows are presented below with actual members blurred out.
