[development] user group permissions

[Chris Johnson]

Boris Mann wrote:
> 
> On 27-Mar-06, at 1:55 PM, Chris Johnson wrote:
> 
>> I'm writing a module which requires that the data displayed be 
>> specified both by user name (no problem, works out of the box) and by 
>> a group that the user is in.  I currently have 286 such groups, and 
>> the number will only grow larger.  This is not a role, but rather a 
>> permission to see certain rows of a database table.
>>
>> I can't help but think that this has been done before in Drupal.  Any 
>> suggestions or pointers as to where best to find existing code that 
>> does this, or otherwise how to implement it?


> I'm thinking about a problem set which looks similar -- potentially 
> large numbers of "groups", or perhaps "groupings" is a better word. 
> Thinking about the issue, it sounds a bit like taxonomy, and from there, 
> a style of taxonomy access. Yes, users aren't nodes...but there have 
> been many demands for a way to make it so, and some sort of relation 
> fits in here too.


I am finding that we often find things which are conceptually similar in 
Drupal and thus for many Drupal developers and users, the inclination is to 
use or extend slightly that same concept, e.g. Boris' suggestion of how this 
is like grouping users in a taxonomy.  Another suggestion I received for this 
centered on the similarities to organic groups (OG).

One challenge in my particular instance is that the number of such groupings 
is large and only grows.  Neither the taxonomy nor the OG model quite work for 
my situation directly.

My use case is this:  User A is in Group 3, and User B is in Group 9.  They 
both navigate to the same URL, e.g.  plist/entity.  Both users see a list of 
entities in a table, but the specific rows in the displayed table are 
different, based on their groups.  That is, the SQL "where" clause contains a 
phrase like "group_id = %d" or similar.

If I can develop a generic solution that others can use, I'd be happy to do 
that.  Since my module is specific to my application, that would probably mean 
developing an API.  :-)

..chris