Content Permissions

Cole Arendt

8/9/2021

Getting Started

To filter content by permissions, you first need a “baseline set of content.” This could be all content on the server, all content in a particular tag, etc.

NOTE: performance will depend heavily on the size of this baseline set of content, because the permissions API today requires enumeration. To improve performance for large sets of content, you can use pins or caching on disk to reduce how often the requests must be re-executed.

We will start by deploying a few pieces of test content, two test users, set access controls, and tags:

bnd <- bundle_static(system.file("logo.png", package = "connectapi"))

content_1 <- deploy(client, bnd, title = "App 1")
content_2 <- deploy(client, bnd, title = "App 2")

user_restricted <- client$users_create("example_restricted", "restricted@example.com", password = create_random_name())
user_all <- client$users_create("example_all", "all@example.com", password = create_random_name())

invisible(create_tag_tree(client, "Example", "Permissions"))
tags <- get_tags(client)
tag_1 <- tags$Example$Permissions

set_content_tags(content_1, tag_1)
set_content_tags(content_2, tag_1)

content_add_user(content_1, user_restricted$guid, role = "viewer")
content_add_user(content_1, user_all$guid, "viewer")
content_add_user(content_2, user_all$guid, "viewer")

Retrieve the Content List

The content_list_with_permissions() function is the core of what we want. However, it defaults to return all content on the server. For some servers, this is very expensive (and can take 30 minutes or more).

Instead, we recommend using the .p argument to define a “predicate” function (in the style of purrr::keep()) that determines which records to keep. Since all this predicate has access to is the “content list” itself, we will retrieve a list of Content GUIDs first.

my_tag_content <- content_list_by_tag(client, tag_1)
content_guids <- my_tag_content$guid

c_with_p <- content_list_with_permissions(client, .p = ~ .x$guid %in% content_guids)

# another approach, with a function
c_with_p <- content_list_with_permissions(client, .p = function(.x) {
  .x$guid %in% content_guids
})

# notice the "permission" column:
c_with_p$permission

Filter the Content List

We added a helper function to the package that should filter the content list for you: content_list_guid_has_access()

In a Shiny application or other personalized context (i.e. using session$user), you then filter the content list to only what a user should see (using the permissions column returned above)

# restricted has access
content_list_guid_has_access(c_with_p, user_restricted$guid) %>% .$title

# "all" has access
content_list_guid_has_access(c_with_p, user_all$guid) %>% .$title

Display the Content List

We plan to build a full example in Shiny (and to show example code below). However, suffice it to say that for RStudio Connect version 1.9.0 or newer, connectwidgets is a great way to plan to display your data, and provides several helpers for doing so!