Dynamic roles

Introduction

Plone core's borg.localrole package allows you to hook into role-resolving code and add roles dynamically. I.e. the role on the user depends on HTTP request / environment conditions and is not something set in the site database.

Creating a dynamic role

First create an Ploneadd-on for your coding needs.

getRoles() function is called several times per request so you might want to cache the result.

There is a complex example below.

• getAllRoles() is overridden to return a custom role which is not available through normal security machinery. This is required because Plone/Zope builds look-up tables based on the result of getAllRoles() and all possible roles must appear there
• getRoles() is overridden to call custom getDummyRolesOnContext() which has the actual logic to resolve the roles
• An example code checks whether the context object implements a marker interface and gives the user a role based on that

Example localroles.py:

from zope.interface import Interface, implements
from zope.component import adapts
from zope.component.interfaces import ISiteManager
from borg.localrole.interfaces import ILocalRoleProvider

from plone.memoize import forever
from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName
from Products.DummyHospital.interfaces import IDummyHospital, IDummyCountry

class DummyLocalRoleAdapter(object):
    """ Give additional Member roles based on context and DummyUser type.

    This enables giving View permission on items higher in the
    traversign path than the user folder itself.
    """
    implements(ILocalRoleProvider)
    adapts(Interface)

    def __init__(self, context):
        self.context = context


    def getDummyRolesOnContext(self, context, principal_id):
        """ Calculate magical Dummy roles based on the user object.

        Note: This function is *heavy* since it wakes lots of objects along the acquisition chain.
        """

        # Filter out bogus look-ups - Plone calls this function
        # for every possible role look up out there, but
        # we are interested only these two cases
        if IDummyMarkerInterface.providedBy(context):
                return ["Dummy Member"]

        # No match
        return []

    def getRoles(self, principal_id):
        """Returns the roles for the given principal in context.

        This function is additional besides other ILocalRoleProvider plug-ins.

        @param context: Any Plone object
        @param principal_id: User login id
        """
        return self.getDummyRolesOnContext(self.context, principal_id)

    def getAllRoles(self):
        """Returns all the local roles assigned in this context:
        (principal_id, [role1, role2])"""
        return [ ("dummy_id", ["Dummy Member"]) ]

Custom local role implementation is made effective using ZCML adapter directive in your add-ons configure.zcml:

<configure
    xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"
    xmlns:zcml="http://namespaces.zope.org/zcml">

  <include package="borg.localrole" />

  <adapter
      factory=".localroles.DummyLocalRoleAdapter"
      name="dummy_local_role"
      />

</configure>

If your dynamic role is not any of Plone's existing roles you need to declare it with rolemap.xml.