Thursday, January 10, 2013

Giving Existing Users Access to New Data Sources

UPDATE: Turns out I had released a more limited set of commands prevously.  Think of this method as version 2.  It's more complete and replaces the previous method.

There is a limitation in NPC that is a little annoying.  If you have a slew of users created in NPC (either using LDAP integration or just local product authentication) and you add a new data source, only nqadmin and nquser get access to the new data source.  By default, all other users don't get any access to the data source.  This doesn't mean they don't get access to the data, it just means that they can't log into the web GUI for that data source.  The 'proper' action would be to edit every single user and grant them either user, power user, or admin rights to the new data source.  With the advent of SSO and LDAP integration, this just won't work (especially if you have more than a couple dozen users).  And if you've made it a habit to only use the nqadmin account for root level tasks and you are using your own account (setup as an administrator), you would be able to add the data source but not be able to access it until you edit your own user account and give yourself access.  The silly thing is that any new users based on the nqadmin or nquser account would have access to the data source.  The problem is with existing users.

This is a difficult nut to crack; There are a couple features that could be built into NPC that would prevent the data source adder from having to touch every single user:

  1. Give all users no access.  This is what happens now.
  2. Give all users 'user' access to the data source.  This means that you would still have to log edit your own account and grant yourself admin access, not to mention any other accounts that need to be administrators on the new data source.
  3. Give all users except the data source adder 'user' access.  This would allow you immediate admin access, but any other admins would still have to be edited manually.
  4. Give all users the same access to the new data source as they have in NPC.  By this I mean that if a user is an administrator in NPC, they become an administrator for the new data source as well.  If they're a user in NPC, they become a user in NPC.  
  5. Give all cloned users the same access as the account they were cloned from.  So, if a user was cloned from the nquser account (which inherits access to the new data source by default), then that user would also inherit access to the new data source.  
  6. Setup product privilege sets and assign them to users.  I'd create three: all admin, all power user, and all user.  Then I could go to one place to make the change and all the users would be affected.
None of these features are in NPC or is there any indication they will be built into CAPC.  So, in the mean time, here's how you fix it.  The following query will essentially do option #4 above, giving all users the same access to all data sources as they have in NPC.  So, if they're a user in NPC, they'll have user access to all the data sources.  If they're an admin in NPC, they'll have admin access to all the data sources.



There are two ways that this query can be run: 1) scheduled task or 2) manual batch file after adding a data source.  Either way should be sufficient.  Option 2 would be more efficient since this only needs to be done after a new data source is added to NPC.

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