Alfresco: Folder permission by role - alfresco

Problem: we have a space template that we use as a folder structure for share sites document library. Our aim is to make visible some folders to special users that have a custom role (created in sitePermissions.xml).
generally we can do that with groups but we need to do that with roles (e.g. when we invite an external user, we wish to assign him to an internal role so he can automatically see some folders).
Please help us with some clues.

Short Version: You need need to assign that role (i.e. Collaborator) to the user either directly or indirectly using a group.
Generally speaking, access on a node is controlled by access control lists where each list entry is a triplet (authority, permission, allow-or-deny). Groups and individual people are authorities, Roles are really just sets of permissions.
Alfresco "only" allows you to add/remove (allow-)entries by authority and permission/role.
At the end of the day, a users role (on a space!) depends on whether he/she is assigned that role directly as {john,Collaborator} or indirectly via {group_containing_john, Collaborator}. Furthermore this assignment (which sticks to a node) propagates through the space hierarchy unless inherit permissions is disabled.

It's possible but you don't want to go there like Andreas is suggesting. Even Alfresco's own (older way) of site permissions is the same. The site_manager, site_collaborator etc. are system groups which Alfresco creates and if you're in one of those groups you'll have your permission within the site.
Oke if you still insist, here is the way to go.
There are 2 repository webscripts to get the Documentlibrary (not counting other ways like search, document-details, etc.)
alfresco\templates\webscripts\org\alfresco\slingshot\documentlibrary-v2\doclist.get
alfresco\templates\webscripts\org\alfresco\slingshot\documentlibrary\treenode.get
Open the corresponding .js files (override them). When looping through the items get all the permissionset for the node, then match the permission to the one you need. If it's true go through and if it's false don't add it.
Then again I want to state that this is a heavy operation, so if you have a huge folder collection and you're doing this with like 100 concurrent user, the users won't be happy with the performance.

Related

AUTHENTIK user groups

Is there any way to add user types/groups to authentik? In the current application we have several types of users, each with different rights, and we are adding authentik. I would like to enforce this also with authentik but dont seem to find any documentation on that.

GraphDB account modeling: user access relationship attribute or relationship?

I am attempting to model account access in a graph DB.
The account can have multiple users and multiple features. A user can have access to many accounts. Each account can give access to only part of the features for each user.
One way I see it is to represent access for each user through relationship attributes, this allows having a shared feature node.
user_1 has access to account_1-feature_1 and account_2-feature-2. user_1 does not have access to account_1-feature_2 even though it is enabled for the account.
Another way to model the same access, but without relationship attribute is to create account specific feature nodes.
Question 1: which of these 2 ways is a more 'proper' modeling in the graph DB world?
Now to make things more interesting the account can also have parts which can be accessed by multiple accounts and a certain feature should be able to be scoped down to only be accessible for specific part by user.
In this example user_1 can access account_1 only for part_a feature_1.
To me it seems like defining an attribute on relationship is the way to go for being able to scope down user access by feature & by part of the account. However, reading neo4j powerpoints this would be one of the code smells of relationships having "Lots of attribute-like properties". Is there a better way to approach such problem in a graph?
I could be wrong here, but here are my thoughts. Option 1 definitely sounds the better way from a modeling perspective, however, I don't see how you can keep the data consistent without building heavy machinery to do it. For example, If someone deletes Account1.Feature1, and does not update the edge from User1 -> Account1, then you end up having stale RBAC rules in the system. You think you have access to something, but in reality that "thing" does not exist anymore. Option 2 may not seem very attractive from a data model perspective, but it does keep your data consistent. If you delete Account1.Feature1, the edge is automatically deleted in the same transaction.
The only con is that, you need to incur additional cost at insertion where you need to insert a lot more nodes than Option 1. For an RBAC system, I think its a fair compromise.
The same comment applies to the second half of your question as well.

Migrate Plone users and groups to relational data

I have a Plone 4 site which contains a lot of users and groups which are stored in the ZODB. Over time, we added some functionality which uses relational data (in a PostgreSQL database); some tables have fields which contain user or group ids.
However, currently the users and groups are defined in ZODB rather than the RDB, so we don't have proper foreign keys here. Thus, the obvious idea is to migrate the user and groups data to the RDB - those who/which are used by the Plone site, at least; I assume emergency users need to be an exception to this (but those are no members of any groups anyway).
Would this be a good thing to do?
Are there reasons to do it only partly, or should I transfer everything including group memberships? (Since memberships are stored as lists of users (and/or groups) with the containing group, I could imagine a reverse table which holds all groups a user is member of, and which is maintained by a trigger function.)
Are there any special tools to use?
Thank you!
imho it's based on what you want to achieve. In Plone you have PAS, so technically it doesn't really matter, where you put users, groups and user group relationships.
You can store users/groups in:
Plone (by default)
SQL - pas.plugins.sqlalchemy
LDAP/AD - Products.PloneLDAP
There are also many other plugins for AUTH, like RPX, Goolge+, etc.
You can enable, disable and modify the behabvior of every plugin thru PAS.
Does it make sense, to NOT use Plone users?
Of course, if you want to share user credentials (Example LDAP), or if you need the user informations in other Apps, etc.
Migration
Should be very simple if the PAS plugins you are using supports "Properties" and "User enumeration".
Get the data from one plugin and put the data into another one with a simple python script. Both supports the same API.
the tool you're looking for is https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pas.plugins.sqlalchemy/0.3
I've used this in a webportal where users are "shared" with a newsletter system.
I've 200 users and any problem.
I think the only "good reason" to store users in an external DB rather in zodb/plone is in a use-case like mine.
Have you ever think about "extend" plone users (ex. https://plone.org/products/collective.examples.userdata)? With plone.api you can easly manipulate users' properties in your code.

Use of session in role based access control (RBAC)

I am trying to understand access control based on RBAC model. I referred to the following link.
NIST RBAC Data Model
I haven't understood this part clearly as mentioned in the excerpt -
*"Each session is a mapping of one user to possibly many roles, i.e., a user establishes a session during which the user activates some subset of roles that he or she is assigned. Each session is associated with a single user and each user is associated with one or more sessions. The function session_roles gives us the roles activated by the session and the function user_sessions gives us the set of sessions that are associated with a user. The permissions available to the user are the permissions assigned to the roles that are activated across all the user.s sessions."*
Question - How can session be used to activate roles ? The relationship between the user / group and roles are inserted as admin data. So, how does session activate subset of roles for a user ?
P.S -> I asked this question earlier here but without an answer. May be this question is too basic to ask but I am keen to understand it. Any use case or a link will definitely be helpful.
Thanks for your time.
In RBAC, administrators give permissions by assigning them to roles, and in addition by assigning roles to users. As you know, for a user to be able to use a particular permission, he will have to have been assigned at least one role that provides said solution.
So each user has a set of roles assigned to him. During a session, he can choose to activate (or deactivate) any of these roles, but no other. The activated roles determine which permissions are available to the user at a given time during the session. This is useful, for example, for dynamic separation of duty constraints, where two roles A and B can be assigned to the same user U, but can't be used together. Therefore, if U wants to use A, he will have to deactivate B before activating A.
From my experience in implementing RBAC, I pretty much avoided using dynamic management of multi-sessions.
At first it sounded like a pretty neat and flexible idea, but as you questioned on who activates/deactivates roles (and when), I realized the complexity and security risks wasn't worth the effort (my personal opinion).
The important thing to understand here and for which #Imontriux (above) mentioned:
"This is useful, for example, for dynamic separation of duty
constraints, where two roles A and B can be assigned to the same user
U, but can't be used together. Therefore, if U wants to use A, he will
have to deactivate B before activating A."
Most of the time, there are separation of duty constraints that must apply and in order to honour this, I simply chose to only have/manage one valid session per user at a time. If a user wants to authenticate under different set of roles, he/she is responsible in logging out and logging back in.
It pretty much simplified a lot of my code. It was a compromise I chose and could easily live with.

Granting a Drupal role to all users that have a certain role

I need to automatically apply a role, Role X, to all Drupal users that have been granted a separate role, Role Y. In other words, I wish for Role X to be a subset of Role Y. How can I do this?
You could implement hook_user() in a custom module. On the 'insert' and/or 'update' action, you'd check for role Y in the $account->roles array. If present, add role X if not already there. This would ensure that your rule gets applied every time a user account gets created and/or changed.
For a bootstrapping/one time operation, take a look at user_multiple_role_edit(). It lets you add or remove roles for an array of user ids. Alternatively, you could do it directly in the database:
INSERT INTO users_roles (uid, rid)
SELECT uid, [roleX_ID] AS rid FROM users_roles
WHERE uid IN
(SELECT uid FROM users_roles WHERE rid = [roleY_ID])
AND uid NOT IN
(SELECT uid FROM users_roles WHERE rid = [roleX_ID])
;
I agree with Henrik Opel on using hook_user in a custom module would be a good solution to maintain the users and make sure they are up to date all the time.
Normally I wouldn't mind writing SQL or something alike, but in this case, since it's on a production site, I would prefer a different route, since if something can easily go wrong when writing raw SQL, a little typo can cause big troubles. Another good point is that you can run into problems as drupal wont be aware of what raw SQL you run on your database and might get out of sync with some processes, hooks and other processes that's normally run when you do things through the Drupal API.
Instead you can use the drupal user admin interface. I actually think that in this case, it is the easiest way to do what you want. Simply filter all users that are students. Click all the users and give them the member role. This is done with a few clicks in no time, and is very secure since Drupal will handle all the SQL for you.
Updated
With that many users, I'm surprised that you don't have a custom user and content managing page setup using views_bulk_operations. Using a few minutes, you can setup a admin page which you can use to preform bulk operations like changing user status, roles, or perform similar tasks for nodes. You can create your own filters using exposed views filters. So with a few clicks you can select all the users with role of student and that isn't member, select them all and add the member roll to them. The advantage doing this is not only that it's quick and safe, but you can create some nice managing pages for your site administrators, content creators etc. You should consider looking into this module.
The LDAP module allows you to dynamically assign roles based on DN. I actually had to write my own module that is tailored specifically to our system, otherwise I would be more than happy to share it.
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