managing-relationships-between-objects.mdx

sidebar_position	slug	description
2	/interacting/managing-relationships-between-objects	Granting a user access to a particular object through a relationship with another object

import { AuthzModelSnippetViewer, CardBox, CheckRequestViewer, DocumentationNotice, ProductConcept, ProductName, ProductNameFormat, RelatedSection, WriteRequestViewer, } from '@components/Docs';

Managing Relationships Between Objects

In this guide you will learn how to grant a user access to a particular object through a relationship with another object.

Giving user access through a relationship with another object is helpful because it allows scaling as the number of object grows. For example:

• organization that owns many repos
• team that administers many documents

Before you start

In order to understand this guide correctly you must be familiar with some and know how to develop the things that we will list below.

Assume that you have the following

• a repo type that can have a admin relation

<AuthzModelSnippetViewer configuration={{ schema_version: '1.1', type_definitions: [ { type: 'user', }, { type: 'repo', relations: { admin: { this: {}, }, }, metadata: { relations: { admin: { directly_related_user_types: [{ type: 'user' }] }, }, }, }, ], }} />

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In addition, you will need to know the following:

Direct Access

You need to know how to create an authorization model and create a relationship tuple to grant a user access to an object. Learn more →

Concepts

• A : a class of objects that have similar characteristics
• A : an entity in the system that can be related to an object
• A : is a string defined in the type definition of an authorization model that defines the possibility of a relationship between an object of the same type as the type definition and a user in the system
• An : represents an entity in the system. Users' relationships to it can be define through relationship tuples and the authorization model
• A : a grouping consisting of a user, a relation and an object stored in

Step By Step

For the current model, a can be related as an admin to an of repo. If we wanted to have Anne be related to two repos, repo:1 and repo:2, we would have to add two , like so:

<WriteRequestViewer relationshipTuples={[ { user: 'user:anne', relation: 'admin', object: 'repo:1', }, { user: 'user:anne', relation: 'admin', object: 'repo:2', }, ]} />

In general, every time we wanted to add a new admin relationship to a repo we'd have to add a new tuple. This doesn't scale as the list of repos and users grows.

01. Modify Authorization Model

Another way of modeling this is to have an authorization model as follows:

<AuthzModelSnippetViewer configuration={{ schema_version: '1.1', type_definitions: [ { type: 'user', }, { type: 'repo', relations: { admin: { union: { child: [ { this: {}, }, { tupleToUserset: { tupleset: { object: '', relation: 'owner', }, computedUserset: { object: '', relation: 'repo_admin', }, }, }, ], }, }, owner: { this: {}, }, }, metadata: { relations: { owner: { directly_related_user_types: [{ type: 'org' }] }, admin: { directly_related_user_types: [{ type: 'user' }] }, }, }, }, { type: 'org', relations: { repo_admin: { this: {}, }, }, metadata: { relations: { repo_admin: { directly_related_user_types: [{ type: 'user' }] }, }, }, }, ], }} />

In this model, we have:

• added a new type org with one relation repo_admin.
• added a new relation owner for type repo.
• re-defined the relation admin for repo. A user can be defined as an admin directly, as we have seen above, or through the repo_admin from owner clause. How this works, for example, is that if user is related as repo_admin to org:xyz, and org:xyz is related as owner to repo:1, then user is an admin of repo:1.

02. Adding Relationship Tuples Where User Is Another Object

With this model, we can add tuples representing that an org is the owner of a repo. By adding following relationship tuples, we are indicating that the xyz organization is the owner of repositories with IDs 1 and 2:

<WriteRequestViewer relationshipTuples={[ { user: 'org:xyz', relation: 'owner', object: 'repo:1', }, { user: 'org:xyz', relation: 'owner', object: 'repo:2', }, ]} />

03. Adding Relationship Tuples To The Other Object

Now, imagine we have a new user Becky. If we wanted to have Becky be the admin of all repos without having to add one tuple per repo, all we need to do is add one tuple that says that Becky is related as repo_admin to org:xyz.

<WriteRequestViewer relationshipTuples={[ { user: 'user:becky', relation: 'repo_admin', object: 'org:xyz', }, ]} />

04. Validating User Access

We can now verify that Becky an admin of all the repos owned by org:xyz:

<CheckRequestViewer user={'user:becky'} relation={'admin'} object={'repo:1'} allowed={true} />

<CheckRequestViewer user={'user:becky'} relation={'admin'} object={'repo:2'} allowed={true} />

05. Revoking Access

Suppose now that we want to prevent users from being an admin of repo:1 via org:xyz. We can delete one tuple:

<WriteRequestViewer deleteRelationshipTuples={[ { user: 'org:xyz', relation: 'owner', object: 'repo:1', }, ]} />

With this change, we may now verify that Becky is no longer an admin of repo:1.

<CheckRequestViewer user={'user:becky'} relation={'admin'} object={'repo:1'} allowed={false} />

Related Sections

<RelatedSection description="Check the following sections for more on how to model relationships between objects." relatedLinks={[ { title: 'Modeling Parent-Child Objects', description: 'Learn about how to cascade relationships from parent object to child object.', link: '../modeling/parent-child', id: '../modeling/parent-child.mdx', }, { title: 'Modeling Object to Object Relationships', description: 'Learn about modeling patterns on objects that are not specifically tied to a user.', link: '../modeling/building-blocks/object-to-object-relationships', id: '../modeling/building-blocks/object-to-object-relationships.mdx', }, { title: 'Modeling GitHub', description: 'An example of object to object relationships.', link: '../modeling/advanced/github', id: '../modeling/advanced/github.mdx', }, ]} />