I should clarify
something. It is entirely possible for a user to
have a role in a group without being a member of
that group. One of the good use cases that someone
from the team informed me about previously is an
administrator for a group of doctors. The
membership scenario would look like this:
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Bill (User)
GROUP = Doctors
ROLE = Admin
In this case, Bill (the user) would not be a member
of the Doctors group himself, he would simply be an
administrator for the group. If he were to be a
member of the group (as well as an Administrator)
then that would require the following additional
record:
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Bill (User)
GROUP = Doctors
ROLE = null
So, in a nutshell - if a Role is specified, it means
the member has that role for the specified group,
however the member is not an actual member of the
group themselves. Hope that makes sense!
On 15/10/12 18:19, Shane Bryzak wrote:
No, not that kind. I'm currently reviewing the
database schema for the identity management module -
in the previous version of PicketLink we had quite a
good design [1] that was a little abstract, but met
all the requirements well. Here's a summary of the
key tables:
IdentityObject - this table would contain both User
and Group records
IdentityObjectRelationship - models the relationship
between User and Group, i.e. Group memberships
IdentityObjectRelationshipName - this table is a
special one that contained the names for "named
relationships". A named relationship can
effectively be thought of as a Role, (and was also
modelled in the IdentityObjectRelationship table)
for example "John" (User) is a "Manager" (Role, the
"named" bit of the relationship) in "Head Office"
(Group) - see [2] for more details.
With the introduction of application roles we need
to jig this design a little bit. I was thinking of
keeping IdentityObject essentially the same, with
the exception that it would also be used to contain
Roles, as well as Users and Groups. Instead of the
IdentityObjectRelationship table though, I propose
we go with the following slightly less abstract
design:
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER
GROUP
ROLE
This basically allows us to make any IdentityType
(User, Group or Role) a member of a Group or Role,
or both. Here's a few scenarios:
1. John is a part of the accounting group.
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = John (User)
GROUP = accounting
ROLE = null
2. The Manager group is a subgroup of the Employee
group.
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Manager (Group)
GROUP = Employee
ROLE = null
3. Kevin is an administrator for the Manager group
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Kevin (User)
GROUP = Manager
ROLE = Admin
4. Kelly is a superuser (which is an application
role)
IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Kelly (User)
GROUP = null
ROLE = Superuser
With the above examples in mind, this now leads into
the "meaningful relationships" theme - can anyone
think of any other meaningful security relationships
that cannot be modelled with this design? I'm not
really looking to make the design "future proof" as
such, but I would like to ensure we cover all
currently known scenarios / use cases. Comments and
feedback welcome of course.
[1]
http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/picketlink/idm/downloads/docs/1.0.0.GA/ReferenceGuide/en-US/html_single/index.html#spi_model
[2]
http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/picketlink/idm/downloads/docs/1.0.0.GA/ReferenceGuide/en-US/html_single/index.html#d0e342
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