Adding Permissions to Resources

Public bulletin boards are great. Anyone can inform others of just about anything. On the other hand, anyone can post just about anything on the bulletin board. Some of this content might not be relevant to the community. Other content might be inappropriate. Thus, you sometimes need a way to restrict who can post or access content.

Fortunately, no matter what your portlet does, access to it and to its content can be controlled with permissions. Read on to learn about Liferay’s permissions system and how add permissions to your application.

Liferay’s Permission System

Liferay’s permission system uses a flexible mechanism that defines the actions that a given user can perform within the context of the portal or a specific portlet. Portal and portlet developers break down the operations that can be performed in the portal or portlet into distinct actions. The act of granting the ability to perform an action to a specific role is the act of granting a permission. In Liferay, permissions are not granted to directly to users. Instead, permissions are granted to roles. Roles, in turn, can be assigned to specific users, sites, organizations, or user groups.

Developers need to define the different types of operations that are required to suit the business logic of their applications. They don’t need to worry about which users will receive which permissions. Once the actions have been determined and configured, portal administrators can grant permissions to perform those actions to users, sites, organizations, or user groups by assigning roles. Administrators can use the portal’s administration tools to grant permissions to roles or they can use the permissions UIs of individual portlets.

In this article, you’ll learn how a Liferay application developer can use Liferay’s permissions system to provide the portal administrator the same level of control over permissions that she has over the default Liferay applications.

Before proceeding, make sure you understand these critical terms:

Action: An operation that can be performed by a portal user. For example, actions that be performed on the Guestbook portlet include ADD_TO_PAGE, CONFIGURATION, and VIEW. Actions that can be performed on a Guestbook entity include ADD_ENTRY, DELETE, PERMISSIONS, UPDATE, and VIEW.

Resource: A generic representation of any portlet or entity in the portal on which an action can be performed. Resources are used for permission checking. For example, resources within a Liferay portal instance could include the RSS portlet with instance ID hF5f, a globally scoped Wiki page, a Guestbook entry of the site X, and the Message Boards post with ID 5052.

Permission: An action that can be performed on a resource. In Liferay’s database, resources and actions are saved in pairs. (Each entry in the ResourceAction table contains both the name of a portlet or entity and the name of an action.) For example, the VIEW action with respect to viewing the Guestbook portlet is associated with the guestbook_WAR_guestbookportlet portlet ID. The VIEW actions with respect to viewing a Guestbook or viewing a Guestbook entry are associated with the com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Guestbook and com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Entry entities, respectively.

There are two kinds of resources in Liferay: portlet resources and model resources. Portlet resources represent portlets. The names of portlet resources are the portlet IDs from the portlets’ portlet.xml files (or in the case of core portlets, Liferay’s portlet-custom.xml. Model resources refer to entities within Liferay. The names of model resources are the fully qualified class names of the entities they represent. In the XML displayed below, permission implementations are first defined for the portlet resource and then for the model resources.

You can add permissions to your custom portlets using four easy steps (also known as DRAC):

  1. Define all resources and their permissions. This is the step presented in this tutorial.

  2. Register all defined resources in the permissions system. This is also known as adding resources. This step is discussed in the tutorial Adding and Deleting Resources.

  3. Associate the necessary permissions with resources. This step is discussed in the tutorial Exposing the Permission Interface to Users.

  4. Check permission before returning resources. This step is described in the tutorial Checking Permissions.

Define All Resources and Permissions

The first step is to define your resources and the actions that can be defined on them. The Guestbook portlet is used here to demonstrate how to define portlet resources and model resources. Open the default.xml file in the Guestbook portlet’s docroot/WEB-INF/src/resource-actions directory and you’ll see the following mapping of resources to actions:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE resource-action-mapping PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD Resource Action Mapping 6.2.0//EN"
"http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-resource-action- mapping_6_2_0.dtd">

<resource-action-mapping>
    <portlet-resource>
        <portlet-name>guestbook</portlet-name>
        <permissions>
            <supports>
                <action-key>ADD_TO_PAGE</action-key>
                <action-key>CONFIGURATION</action-key>
                <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
            </supports>
            <site-member-defaults>
                <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
            </site-member-defaults>
            <guest-defaults>
                <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
            </guest-defaults>
            <guest-unsupported />
        </permissions>
    </portlet-resource>

    <model-resource>
        <model-name>com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model</model-name>
        <portlet-ref>
            <portlet-name>guestbook</portlet-name>
        </portlet-ref>
        <permissions>
        <supports>
            <action-key>ADD_GUESTBOOK</action-key>
            <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
        </supports>
        <site-member-defaults>
            <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
        </site-member-defaults>
        <guest-defaults />
        <guest-unsupported>
            <action-key>ADD_GUESTBOOK</action-key>
            <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
        </guest-unsupported>
        </permissions>
    </model-resource>

    <model-resource>
        <model-name>com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Guestbook</model-name>
        <portlet-ref>
            <portlet-name>guestbook</portlet-name>
        </portlet-ref>
        <permissions>
        <supports>
            <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
            <action-key>DELETE</action-key>
            <action-key>PERMISSIONS</action-key>
            <action-key>UPDATE</action-key>
            <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
        </supports>
        <site-member-defaults>
            <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
            <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
        </site-member-defaults>
        <guest-defaults>
            <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
        </guest-defaults>
        <guest-unsupported>
            <action-key>UPDATE</action-key>
        </guest-unsupported>
        </permissions>
    </model-resource>

    <model-resource>
        <model-name>com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Entry</model-name>
        <portlet-ref>
            <portlet-name>guestbook</portlet-name>
        </portlet-ref>
        <permissions>
        <supports>
            <action-key>DELETE</action-key>
            <action-key>PERMISSIONS</action-key>
            <action-key>UPDATE</action-key>
            <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
        </supports>
        <site-member-defaults>
            <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
        </site-member-defaults>
        <guest-defaults>
            <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
        </guest-defaults>
        <guest-unsupported>
            <action-key>UPDATE</action-key>
        </guest-unsupported>
        </permissions>
    </model-resource>
</resource-action-mapping>

The <portlet-resource> tag is used to define actions that can be taken with respect to the portlet window. For the Guestbook portlet, such actions include these:

  • ADD_TO_PAGE: Add the portlet to a page
  • CONFIGURATION: Access the portlet’s Configuration window
  • VIEW: View the portlet

All the supported actions are defined in the <supports> tag, a sub-tag of the <permissions> tag (which is itself a sub-tag of the <portlet-resource> tag:

<supports>
    <action-key>ADD_TO_PAGE</action-key>
    <action-key>CONFIGURATION</action-key>
    <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
</supports>

The default permissions for site members are defined in the <site-member-defaults> tag. In the case of the Guestbook portlet, site members can view any Guestbook portlet in the site:

<site-member-defaults>
    <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
</site-member-defaults>

Similarly, the default permissions for guests are defined in the <guest-defaults> tag. Guests can also view any Guestbook portlet in the site:

<guest-defaults>
    <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
</guest-defaults>

The <guest-unsupported> tag specifies permissions forbidden to guests. There aren’t any forbidden Guestbook portlet for guests:

<guest-unsupported />

However, guests are forbidden from adding guestbooks and guestbook entries, for example, see the following entry in the first <model-resource> tag:

<guest-unsupported>
    <action-key>ADD_GUESTBOOK</action-key>
    <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
</guest-unsupported>

The <model-resource> tag is used to define actions that can be performed with respect to models, also known as entities. There are two kinds of actions in Liferay: top-level actions and resource actions. Top-level actions are not applied to a particular resource. For example, the action of adding a new entity is not applied to a particular resource, so it’s considered a top-level action. The first <model-resource> tag defines adding guestbook and guestbook entry resources as top-level actions:

<supports>
    <action-key>ADD_GUESTBOOK</action-key>
    <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
</supports>

The second and third <model-resource> tags define resource actions that can be applied to the Guestbook, and GuestbookEntry entities, respectively. For example, the permissions for the following actions are defined with respect to the resource associated with the Guestbook entity:

<supports>
    <action-key>ADD_ENTRY</action-key>
    <action-key>DELETE</action-key>
    <action-key>PERMISSIONS</action-key>
    <action-key>UPDATE</action-key>
    <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
</supports>

Similarly, the permissions for the following actions are defined with respect to the resource associated with the GuestbookEntry entity:

<supports>
    <action-key>DELETE</action-key>
    <action-key>PERMISSIONS</action-key>
    <action-key>UPDATE</action-key>
    <action-key>VIEW</action-key>
</supports>

In each <model-resource> tag, notice that the model name must be defined. The <model-name> must be either the fully-qualified name of a package or of an entity class. For example, com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model is the name of a package and com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Guestbook is the name of an entity class. Using a package is the recommended convention for permissions that refer to top-level actions:

<model-name>com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model</model-name>

The ADD_GUESTBOOK and ADD_ENTRY permissions are defined this way since they’re top-level actions. For resource actions, the entity class is specified:

<model-name>com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Guestbook</model-name>

The <portlet-ref> element comes next and contains a <portlet-name> sub-tag.

<portlet-ref>
    <portlet-name>guestbook</portlet-name>
</portlet-ref>

The value of <portlet-name> references the name of the portlet to which the model resource belongs. It’s possible for a model resource to belong to multiple portlets referenced with multiple <portlet-name> elements, but this is uncommon.

The <supports>, <site-member-defaults>, <guest-defaults>, and <guest-unsupported> tags work the same way in the <model-resource> tag as they do in the <portlet-resource> tag. The <supports> tag lets you specify a list of supported actions that require permission to perform. The <site-member-defaults> tag and the <guest-defaults> tags define default permissions for site members and guests, respectively. And the <guest-unsupported> tag specifies permissions forbidden to guests.

After defining resource permissions for your portlet, you need to point Liferay to the resource-actions XML file that contains your definitions. This is docroot/WEB-INF/src/resource-actions/default.xml for the Guestbook project. In Liferay’s core, there are multiple permissions XML definition files for various core Liferay portlets in the portal/portal-impl/src/resource-actions directory. The default.xml file contains pointers to the definition files of the various applications. This excerpt from default.xml references the resource permission definition files for all built-in Liferay portlets:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE resource-action-mapping PUBLIC
 "-//Liferay//DTD Resource Action Mapping 6.2.0//EN"
 "http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-resource-action-mapping_6_2_0.dtd">

<resource-action-mapping>
    <resource file="resource-actions/portal.xml" />
    <resource file="resource-actions/announcements.xml" />
    <resource file="resource-actions/asset.xml" />
    <resource file="resource-actions/blogs.xml" />
    ...
</resource-action-mapping>

Your plugin’s permissions XML file should be named default.xml and should be placed in a directory in your project’s classpath. docroot/WEB-INF/src/resource-actions is the standard location. Once your project’s default.xml file has been created, you should create a properties file named portlet.properties that contains a reference to your permissions XML file. In your portlet.properties file, create a property named resource.actions.configs with the relative path to your portlet’s resource-action mapping file (e.g. default.xml) as its value. Here’s what this property specification might look like:

resource.actions.configs=resource-actions/default.xml

Your permissions XML file must contain a root resource-action-mapping element. Check out a copy of the Liferay source code from the Liferay Portal repository to see how resources and permissions are defined for core Liferay portlets. Start by looking at the definition files found in the portal-impl/src/resource-actions directory. For a simple example of defining permissions in the context of a portlet plugin, check out the Liferay Plugins repository and examine the portlet sample-permissions-portlet.

Customizing Liferay Portal

Plugin Security and PACL

Developing Plugins with Liferay IDE

User Interfaces with AlloyUI

Liferay UI Taglibs

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