Forum OpenACS Development: Permissioning/Groups question

Collapse
1: Permissioning/Groups question
Posted by Kevin Lange on 05/21/02 01:19 PM
I've been trying to figure out how in OpenACS I can do the following and was hoping one of you could help my newbie self out!

I'm trying to make a site that has a main site for common info for a group of organizations then have subsites for particular instances of each organization.  A user should have access to the mainsite and the particular subsite they are a member of.  This seems pretty straightforward in OpenACS.  In addition, in each subsite I want to mount an identical application that can be administered by an admin of the subsite that I can assign.  This also is pretty straightforward.  What I don't want is for an admin of a subsite to know/see the names, groups, etc. of the users of the entire mainsite, i.e. subsite admin should only know about subsite people.  Is there an existing way in OpenACS to do this or would I need to create something for this?  The only way I could think of to do this was for the application to retrieve the permissions assigned to it from the database, then retrieve the list of the users who have those permissions for the admin of the subsite app.

Thanks in advance!

Collapse
2: Response to Permissioning/Groups question (response to 1)
Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 05/21/02 05:24 PM
A natural way to do this is to create a group for each subsite that has a composition relation to a higher level group that acts as a container to the subsite groups.  Listing the users for a particular subsite would then consist of retrieving the members of a subsite group.  Permissions for viewing could also then be tied to membership in a particular subsite group.
Collapse
3: Response to Permissioning/Groups question (response to 1)
Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on 05/21/02 06:11 PM
You also might want to download the directory package. This package will list the members of the subsite it is mounted under. Directory can  list all users as well but you can strip that quite easily. You still have to follow Dan's suggestion but the directory package gives you a front end.
Collapse
4: Response to Permissioning/Groups question (response to 1)
Posted by Roger Williams on 05/22/02 05:23 PM
Dan:

There is an automagically created group called "Subsite Parties" (the actual name is that of the subsite) that has a composition relation to "Main Site Parties".

Can this group be used in the way you describe?

Regards..

Collapse
5: Response to Permissioning/Groups question (response to 1)
Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 05/23/02 03:11 AM
I've never used this particular feature, but it appears to be exactly suited to the problem that Kevin is trying to solve.  The fact that the created application group has a relation to the site node is also a very nice bonus for using this feature.
Collapse
6: Response to Permissioning/Groups question (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 05/23/02 04:39 AM
Yes, it should work fine as it does exactly as Dan Wickstrom describes.

Or at least *now* it does, about three weeks ago someone discovered that these weren't created correctly ever for PG, and in either PG or Oracle for subsites not mounted directly under the main site.

I fixed all the problems I'm aware of.  I'd love to get a report back on whether or not they're working as Kevin would expect.

Collapse
7: Response to Permissioning/Groups question (response to 1)
Posted by Kevin Lange on 05/23/02 01:55 PM
That sounds like what I need.  When I get a chance to try and implement this I'll be sure and report what I find out here.  I'm still trying to work my way through the learning curve on several things simultaneously right now, though!