Permissions

Overview

The EHRI admin interface has a flexible permission system that is designed to allow several types of privileges:

  • global (super-admin) privileges

  • global priviliges restricted to a particular content-type

  • scoped privileges that apply to items within the "permission scope" of other items (e.g. archival units held by repositories)

  • item-level privileges

Each of these privilege types can be assigned either directly to an individual user or to a group to which they belong.

Justification

Some of the different scenarios this system was intended to support are outlined in this document.

Permission Sets from the Client Perspective

Permission sets are bundles of data that describe a user's permissions for either a content type or a specific entity. All together, there are three different types of permission sets:

  • Global Permission Sets

  • Scoped Permission Sets

  • Item Permission Sets

When it loads a particular page the application (the client) has to gather the user's permissions that are relevant in a given context. For all intents and purposes the client only needs to know the user's permissions for display purposes so we don't allow users to perform actions (like updating a particular item) for which they don't have the right privileges. The actual permissions will be enforced on the server side, but for a good user experience the client also needs to be aware of them.

Both global and scoped permissions have the same structure. The only difference is that when gathering permissions in the context of a given item, that item's scope (typically it's parent item, if any) comes into play. The data structure, in JSON, looks like:

[
    {
        "bob": {
            "documentaryUnit": [
                "create",
                "update",
                "delete"
            ],
            "repository": [
                "update"
            ]
        }
    }, {
        "bobs-group": {
            "country": [
                "create"
            ]
        }
    }
]

The entire permission set above pertains to the user "bob", who belongs to a group "bobs-group". Bob has create, update, and delete permissions for the content type "documentaryUnit" and update permissions for the "repository" content type. In addition, Bob inherits the create permission for the content type "country" from a group he belongs to.

If fetched in the context of a particular scope the data will have the same structure, but Bob may have additional permissions if, for example, the item is a repository and Bob has permissions to create additional documentaryUnit items within just that repository.

One thing to note about this structure is that item's within the top level list (user -> contentType/Permission map) is semantically a pair rather than a map since it should only have one key/value (and others should be ignored.) A map was used to make parsing simpler in JSON.

Item permissions, by contrast, have a simpler structure:

[
    {
        "bob": [
            "create",
            "update",
            "delete"
        ]
    }, {
        "bobs-group": [
            "annotate"
        ]
    }
]

Because we presumably know the content type of the item we're fetching permissions for, the data we get back only needs to tell us:

  • what permissions we have

  • who they're assigned to (a user themselves, or inherited from a given group.)

Permissions in a request context

Typically, for each request the current user's global permissions are fetched from the server. For pages that pertain to a particular item, such as detail pages, we instead fetch the scoped global permissions and any item-level permissions that may apply (note: these requests are cached with a short expiry time in order to reduce the number of server round-trips needed.) Once the global, scoped, or item-level permission JSON is retrieved it is parsed into either a GlobalPermissionSet or ItemPermissionSet instance, which provide methods to verify if a user has a given permission (for instance, create on content type documentaryUnit) and to retrieve individual Permission instances, which allow determining if the given permission was granted directly to the user or inherited from a group to which they belong.