Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Roles
Access control is based on roles. Read about the different roles and the allowed actions that are associated with role types.
A role combines a set of allowed actions with specific resources. This set of allowed actions is called a role type. For example, the role type Editor contains allowed actions like view resources, modify resources, and create new resources. Roles are denoted as RoleType@Resource. For example, the Editor role type combined with the Market News Page resource results in the role Editor@Market News Page. By default, this role would also allow Editor-style access on descendant resources underneath the Market News Page through role inheritance.
As the following figure illustrates, roles are organized in a hierarchy. Each role type contains all allowed actions that are contained in the role types directly beneath it in the hierarchy. For example, Privileged Users and Editors can do everything that Users can do. Managers can do everything that Editors and Users can do.
The following table describes the individual role types.
| Role Type | Allowed Actions |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Unrestricted access on resources. This includes creating, configuring, and deleting resources. Administrators can also change the access control settings on resource; in other words grant other people access to those resources. |
| Security Administrator | Creating and deleting role assignments on resources. Being assigned Security Administrator role at some resource means that the user shall be allowed to act as a delegated administrator for that resource, in other words the Security Administrator on a resource is allowed to delegate a subset of their privileges on the resource to other people according to the Delegated Administration Policy. For example, a user who is assigned Security Administrator and Editor role on a resource can assign this Editor role to other people provided he has Delegator role on those people. Having the Security Administrator role on a resource alone does not give view or edit access to the resource. |
| Delegator | Assigning the Delegator role to principals (users and groups) allows roles to be granted to them. Having the Delegator role on other resources, such as specific portlets, is not useful. The set of roles that can be granted to those principals is defined through the Security Administrator and Administrator role types. For example a user has a Delegator role on the SalesTeam user group but no Delegator role on the Managers user group, so this user can grant roles only to the SalesTeam or individual members of the SalesTeam user group but not to the Managers user group. Having the Delegator role on a resource does not give direct access to the resource. The purpose of the Delegator role type is to allow the granting of roles to users or groups, so assigning Delegator role on resources or resource types that are not users or user groups will not grant those users additional privileges. |
| Manager | Creating new resources and configuring and deleting existing resources that are used by multiple users. |
| Editor | Creating new resources and configuring existing resources that are used by multiple users. |
| Contributor | Viewing portal content and creating new resources. The Contributor role type does not include the permission to edit resources. It only allows you to create new resources. For example, a user is granted the Contributor role on the Template Category Teamspaces. The user will not be able to modify the category itself but can create new templates in this category.
This role type is only available for the following resources:
|
| Privileged user | Viewing portal content, customizing portlets and pages, and creating new private pages. |
| User | Viewing portal content. For example, viewing a specific page. |
| No role assigned | Cannot interact with resource. |
Inheritance
Resources are part of a hierarchy. Refer to the Resources topic for more information. By default, each resource in the hierarchy inherits the role assignments of its parent resource. This inheritance reduces the administration overhead. When you assign a group to a role on a parent resource, the group automatically acquires that same set of allowed actions for all child resources.
For example, suppose that a user, Mary, is a member of the Sales group. You can give Mary Editor access to the Market News Page and all pages underneath this page by granting the Editor@Market News Page role to the Sales group. Refer to the illustration below. All members of the Sales group implicitly acquire the Editor@Market News Page role. All members of the Sales group will also inherit the Editor role type on all pages that are beneath the Market News page in the resource hierarchy. So, members of the Sales group automatically inherit the role Editor@USA Market News Page.
Inheritance through the resource hierarchy can be blocked at any level to provide more granular access control.
Role blocking
Role blocks prevent inheritance through the resource hierarchy. Two kinds of role blocks exist:- Inheritance blocks: prevent a resource from acquiring role assignments from parent resources. Visualize this as inserting a block above the resource.
- Propagation blocks: prevent a resource from extending role assignments to child resources. Visualize this as inserting a block below the resource.
A role block is role type specific and tied to a specific resource. For example, an inheritance block for roles of type Editor on the Europe Market News page ensures that the Europe Market News page does not inherit any Editor role assignments from its parent resource, the Market News page. This role block does not affect inheritance of other role types. For example, Manager roles are still inherited. So, all users with the Manager@Market News Page role inherit the Manager@Europe Market News Page role unless a separate role block for the Manager role type exists.
Use the Portal Scripting Interface, the User and Group Permissions portlet or the Resource Permissions portlet to create or delete role blocks for all role types except for roles of type Administrator and Security Administrator. Role blocks for roles of type Administrator and Security Administrator can only be inserted or removed through the XML configuration interface. For example, if Mary has the Administrator@Market News Page role, and the USA Market News Page is a child of the Market News Page, Mary automatically has the Administrator@USA Market News Page role. The Administrator@USA Market News Page role cannot be blocked with an inheritance or a propagation block set through the Portal Scripting Interface, or the User and Group Permissions or Resource Permissions portlets.
All role types (including the Administrator and Security Administrator roles) are automatically blocked for the following types of resources:
- Private pages
- Externalized resources that have an internal parent resource
- Internal resources that have an externalized parent resource
For example, if access to the Market News page is controlled internally by WebSphere Portal Express , and the USA Market News Page is controlled externally by IBM Tivoli® Access Manager for e-business, none of the roles on the Market News Page are inherited by the USA Market News Page. So, if Mary has the role Editor@Market News Page, she does not automatically get the role Editor@USA Market News Page because the USA Market News page is managed externally. If both the Market News page and the USA Market News page are managed externally (or if both are managed internally), Mary inherits the role Editor@USA Market News Page unless a role block is used. In general, there is never any inheritance between two resources that differ in their externalization state. In other words, an externally protected resource never inherits from an internally protected resource and vice versa.
Application Roles
There is a higher level concept of roles called application roles. Application roles are identified by a unique name and can contain an arbitrary set of other roles (an example is Editor@Market News page and Editor@Market News portlet). This makes it possible to use application roles to bundle cohesive allowed actions, simplifying access control administration. Application roles with the same name in different database domains are correlated, so it is possible to aggregate roles from different database domains within one application role.
Access control portlets are not set up to handle application roles, but application roles can be handled through the XML configuration interface.
Role Assignments
Roles are assigned to users and groups that are contained in the user registry. Roles can be assigned by someone with the necessary authorization, such as the portal administrator, in any of three ways:- Explicitly assigned to an individual user
- Implicitly assigned through group membership. If a group has a role, all members of the group automatically acquire the role. Nested groups (groups that are members of another group) inherit role assignments from their parent groups.
- Inherited through a role assignment on a parent resource. By default, roles on a resource automatically apply to all children of that resource unless role blocks are used (see Inheritance).
Users and groups can have multiple roles on the same resource. For example, a user might have both the Editor and Manager roles on a particular page. One of these roles might be inherited through the resource hierarchy and the other might be explicitly assigned.
Assign roles to individual users only in exceptional cases. Assigning roles to user groups and managing effective user privileges by adding to or removing users from those groups reduces the number of role mappings and simplifies maintenance.
Ownership
Each resource can have a dedicated owner. The resource owner can be a single user or a single user group. When a user creates a new resource, such as a page, the user automatically becomes the initial owner of that resource. For non-private resources, which are resources accessible by those people having been granted access to the resource, ownership provides the same set of allowed actions as the Manager role type. For private resources, which are resources accessible only by the owner of the resource, ownership provides the same set of allowed actions as the Privileged User role type plus the allowance to delete the resource. So in the case of both non-private and private resources, these allowed actions include the ability to delete the resource.Private resources can only be owned by users, not by user groups. It is not possible to define roles on private resources, and resource ownership cannot be inherited.
You can use the XML configuration interface or the Resource Permissions portlet to change the owner of a resource.
Private pages
A private page can be accessed only by its owner. Privileged Users (users assigned a role of type Privileged User) can explicitly create new private pages that are accessible only by themselves. Additionally, a Privileged User on a non-private page can personalize the page and create new private pages underneath it. Customizing a non-private page usually creates a private copy of the corresponding non-private page. Any changes that a Privileged User makes to a non-private page are not accessible by other users.
Traversal support
Users with role assignments on resources of type Page or URL Mapping do get the implicit permission to navigate to those resources. These users are guaranteed the ability to navigate through all parent resources of those resources. Users only see the title of those resources, while the corresponding resource content (for example the portlets on the page) remains inaccessible unless those users have further role assignments granting them normal access to those resources.
Related information
- Managing Access Control
- Access rights
- Access control scenarios
- Initial Access Control Settings
- Delegated Access Control Administration