Proposal number : Proposal title: Hidden Elements

Date	2008/06/20
Contact(s)	Simon Pigot, Stefano Giaccio, Just
Last edited	Timestamp
Status	draft
Assigned to release	2.5
Resources	Done in geocat.ch sandbox

Overview

Apply permissions to metadata elements (not just records).

Stage 1 – elements are not group related – apply to internet/public/intranet groups only
Stage 2 – add additional granularity via interface

Proposal Type

• Type: GUI Change, Core Change, Module Change
• App: GeoNetwork
• Module: Data Manager

Links

• Email discussions: John Hockaday, Geoscience Australia suggested this on geonetwork-devel

Voting History

• None as yet

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Motivations

Move access/permissions control down to element level.

Proposal

5 components to deal with:

1. Metadata/Template editor: additional controls for selecting elements that are to be hidden to a specific level internet/intranet/public.
2. Selected elements written to database on save/save and close.

3. Database changes: additional dependent table HiddenMetadataElements on schema: MetadataId, Xpath
4. Query table and retrieve XPaths based on GroupId of UserSession, apply XPaths to JDOM tree before record returned from service
5. Lucene index – concealed elements cannot be indexed because the index can be searched by anyone – the permissions systems is not applied until the record is displayed. The interesting outcome of leaving concealed info in the index is that a user could search and get a result on the concealed info but would not be able to see it when the record was displayed.

New improvements not done :

• add ISO attribute (gco:nilReason=”withheld”) for ISO records only – track down all locations where this can happen – could be possible to apply this in DataManager getMetadata
• group level authorisation.

Backwards Compatibility Issues

Previous installations (2.2 and earlier) will need to migrate to a new database if they want to use this. Harvesting from versions < 2.2 – filter is applied to conceal elements regardless of group.

Risks

Participants

• As above