[Zope-dev] Permission

[Jim Fulton]

Tom Deprez wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have this q'n already a long time in my head and I still don't know the
> answer to it. It has to do with the security-view. I hope that someone can
> shed a light on my brains.
> 
> Why is their an Acquire permission (referred to as acq_perm in following
> text) checkbox column?

It allows you to honor permission settings made in containing objects.

> In order to change a permission for a certain role, we have to check or
> uncheck this permission at the roles permission checkbox.

I don't understand this.  You can grant permissions to 
a role locally, regardless of whether you acquire permission
settings.  If you don't acquire, then the role only gets the permissions
you set, otherwise, it *may* get permissions from above.

> However, for this
> to work we have to uncheck the acq_perm column (because if this one is
> checked, the permission is taken from parent-folder-objects anyway, the
> value of the role checkbox doesn't counts at that moment).

You don't have to ncheck the acq_perm column if you simply want to
grant a permission to a role. You only need to uncheck the
acq_perm column if you want to prevent containing objects from
granting a permission to other roles.

> As a drawback,
> this means that all roles have to be checked/unchecked, because they don't
> acquire the permission anymore from one of its parents-folder-objects.

So don't uncheck the acq_perm column.
 
> Now, why couldn't this be implemented like the following? Isn't this easier
> to grasp?
> 
> The Acq_perm column doesn't exists. Assume that acquisition of a permission
> is always Active. The checkboxes of the role show their actual value
> (according to the acquisition). Thus if permissionA is checked in the
> parent-object, permissionA is also checked. If you want, for a certain role
> that this permission is not given, you uncheck permissionA. The subobject
> will show an unchecked permissionA box (because it acquires from its
> parent). In order to give the subobject again the permission, we only have
> to check permissionA.

The problem with this is that it doesn't recognize changes made to containers
later.
 
> A) In the first approach we've to uncheck the acq_perm checkbox and have to
> set the checkbox of every role according to how we want the permission to
> be handled by that role.

You don't need to uncheck the acq_perm checkbox unless you want to
prevent containers from granting permissions.

> B) In the second approach we've to uncheck the permission checkbox of the
> role(s). Other roles are not effected.
> 
> Am I missing something here? Is my explenation somewhere wrong? Why does
> Zope uses the first approach? Which, sounds for me, a little bit more
> complicated.

By acquiring permission settings you are allowing containers to 
grant a permission to a role today or sometime in the future.
This allows someone to control permissions in a centralized fashion.

Jim

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