Defining Document Permissions for custom sources

Document-level permissions are used to manage access to various pieces of content based on an individual’s or team’s attributes. A user may be allowed or denied access to certain documents. Document-level permissions are also known as — or derived from — Access Control Lists (ACLs).

When reasoning about document-level permissions for custom sources, there are two key parts to consider:

Let’s start with a simple document:

{
  "id" : 1234,
  "title" : "The Meaning of Life",
  "body" : "Be kind to others.",
  "url" : "https://example.com",
  "created_at": "2019-06-01T12:00:00+00:00",
  "type": "list"
}

The document consists of six (6) content fields. From here, we want to add granular, user-level control information, which will allow us to restrict who gets to see this result. We can accomplish this using the document-level permission attributes:

{
  "_allow_permissions": [],
  "_deny_permissions": [],
  "id" : 1235,
  "title" : "The Meaning of Time",
  "body" : "Not much. It is a made up thing.",
  "url" : "https://example.com",
  "created_at": "2019-06-01T12:00:00+00:00",
  "type": "list"
}

Our two new arrays, _allow_permissions and _deny_permissions, can hold a grouping of any arbitrary strings.

First, we add permission1 to _allow_permissions for a given document:

{
  "_allow_permissions": ["permission1"],
  "_deny_permissions": [],
  "id" : 1235,
  "title" : "The Meaning of Sleep",
  "body" : "Rest, recharge, and connect to the Ether.",
  "url" : "https://example.com",
  "created_at": "2019-06-01T12:00:00+00:00",
  "type": "list"
}

If we tried searching for this document immediately, we wouldn’t find it. Why? A user or multiple users must first be mapped to this permission value. In other words: permission1 is now required to view the document.

We can map permission1 to a user or multiple users with the External Identities API:

curl -X POST <ENTERPRISE_SEARCH_BASE_URL>/api/ws/v1/sources/[CONTENT_SOURCE_ID]/external_identities \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer [TOKEN]" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "external_user_id": "[EXTERNAL_USER_NAME]",
  "external_user_properties": [
      {
          "attribute_name": "_elasticsearch_username",
          "attribute_value": "[USER_NAME]"
      }
  ],
  "permissions": [
      "permission1"
  ]
}'

Together, [CONTENT_SOURCE_ID] and [EXTERNAL_USER_NAME] form a unique key. However, there can be more than one identity mapped to the same _elasticsearch_username.

To map the same external user to multiple users, it is possible to use more than one _elasticsearch_username object in external_user_properties. Example:

{
  "external_user_id": "[EXTERNAL_USER_NAME]",
  "external_user_properties": [
      {
          "attribute_name": "_elasticsearch_username",
          "attribute_value": "john.doe"
      },
      {
          "attribute_name": "_elasticsearch_username",
          "attribute_value": "jane.smith"
      }
  ],
  "permissions": [
      "permission1"
  ]
}

Let’s recap: we can assign any arbitrary value to the _allow_permissions and _deny_permissions arrays, for any Custom Source document. Once a user exists and has been assigned a permission value, it can be reused across documents in the Custom Source itself.

Let’s now provide a value for _deny_permissions:

{
  "_allow_permissions": ["permission1"],
  "_deny_permissions": ["permission2"],
  "id" : 1235,
  "title" : "The Meaning of Sleep",
  "body" : "Rest, recharge, and connect to the Ether.",
  "url" : "https://example.com",
  "created_at": "2019-06-01T12:00:00+00:00",
  "type": "list"
}

A user assigned both permission1 and permission2 would not have access to the document, because the permission2 deny rule takes precedence.

Let’s add another permission to our user: permission2. The following API call will replace the old list of permissions with a new one:

curl -X PUT <ENTERPRISE_SEARCH_BASE_URL>/api/ws/v1/sources/[CONTENT_SOURCE_ID]/external_identities/[EXTERNAL_USER_ID] \
-H "Authorization: Bearer [TOKEN]" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "permissions": ["permission1", "permission2"]
}'

# API RESPONSE

{
    "content_source_id": "[CONTENT_SOURCE_ID]",
    "external_user_id": "[EXTERNAL_USER_ID]",
    "external_user_properties": [
        {
            "attribute_name": "_elasticsearch_username",
            "attribute_value": "[USER_NAME]"
        }
    ],
    "permissions": [
        "permission1",
        "permission2"
    ]
}

With these changes applied, documents with the permission2 attributes will not be returned for [USER_NAME].

Read the External Identities API reference to learn more about the External Identities endpoint.