New ACL Feature: ‘Ask’!

The updated ACL has a new feature, called ‘Ask’, that can answer any access related question!

Using the ‘Ask’ feature is incredibly simple. The Ask interface is a simple form in the ACL analysis page. All a user has to do is type in a question in the form, click ‘Ask’, and wait for the appropriate response!

eg. If you want to know if user ‘john.smith’ has access to resource ‘res/files/finance’, just ask:
‘Is john.smith allowed to access res/files/finance ?’
and, like magic, the answer will be returned!

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Fig. 1 - Ask a question, get an answer!

Improved User Interface

Several other improvements have been made to the ACL system and the ACL management interface during the development of the Admissions web application for the Open Campus. The improved UI now supports the addition users to role groups, rule management and role graph visualization.

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Fig. 2 - Rule Management

Also, the utility functions for rebuilding the page resource tree and clearing the cache have been moved into an new utilities tab.

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Fig. 3 - Role Graph

Next feature to be built will be a role manager, which would finally allow definition of roles with multiple parent roles.

2 Comments

cl  on April 3rd, 2009

neat-o
of course the only challenge is that the user has to know the page to ask for /page/staff/ask/answers.. !

:-)

Sacha  on April 8th, 2009

True, I suppose an auto-complete feature would be nice. The real value of the feature lies with specifying the role. Instead of hunting down which role group a user belongs to, just supply the user name to get the short and sweet answer from the ACL.