Privileges determine which groups and users are able to view or act upon data from defined resources using the TDV suite of products. Privilege specification provides a comprehensive security layer to safeguard access to resources defined within TDV.

No default privileges are granted for newly defined resources, except to administrators, the resource owner, and users with the Modify All Resources right so that object ownership rights to grant privileges can be controlled solely by selected users.

Privileges can be assigned to an entire domain, selected groups, or individual users. Privileges can be set for any object exposed through TDV: containers (folders or parent objects) and individual resources, down to individual table columns. Privileges can be propagated to subordinate objects (child objects or dependent objects).

If you restrict access to a view in the published layer, the shared area, and in the introspected data source, the column has the same restrictions.

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By default, every object resource defined in Studio is initially created with full privileges for the object creator. Except for administrative users and users with Modify All Resources rights, no other users are granted privileges on new resources unless those privileges are added later—added either to users or to the groups to which they belong.

Default Read privileges are given to members of the all group in the composite domain for all sample resources, system resources, and parent containers of those resources.

Any user who is part of an LDAP domain is automatically given access to the objects that belong to the all group in the composite domain.

By default, anonymous users and users in the dynamic domain are disabled in the TDV installation. They must be explicitly enabled.

The following is a summary of default privileges assigned to system resources.

Each resource in TDV has an owner. The user who creates a resource is initially the default owner. An owner of a resource automatically has all privileges on that resource.

The resource owners can define privileges for groups and users who need to view, access, and use a resource. Privileges can be defined for a parent object in the TDV directory and they can be applied to child resources and subfolders recursively. Child object resources are not available or even visible to users who do not have Read privileges on all of the resource’s parent containers. The owner or administrator has the option to grant or revoke privileges on the owned resource at any time. The owner can revoke his own privileges (for example, to prevent accidental deletion of data), and later re-grant those privileges. A user who is given ownership of a resource can share all the privileges of ownership by giving the Grant privilege to other users or groups. Users who are not administrators or owners of the resource cannot change those privileges.

Administrators, users or groups with the Modify All Resources right can:

Note: For resources that are likely to be called and invoked by other resources, you can give the Grant privilege to distribute access to other developers.

We recommend that you assign privileges by groups rather than by individual users. This style of access control lets future developers manage large numbers of users by adding them to or removing them from groups that combine easily understood sets of role-based privileges.

For LDAP domains, set the privileges for all members in the group at the same time, because individual members of the domain do not appear until they have logged into the system for the first time.

For the composite or dynamic domain, you can increase control by creating additional groups to manage subsets of rights and privileges from the Manager. For the LDAP domain, you must use the LDAP tools to modify groups and their rights.

The following shows a typical privileges dialog for a resource with both implicit privileges (those assigned by group definitions) and explicit privileges (those assigned directly to a user or group). Privileges assigned explicitly are shown by a green check mark. An amber check mark shows privileges assigned implicitly (acquired by either group membership or possession of a right like Modify All Resources).

Privileges fall into two groups, design-time and run-time. Read privilege belongs to both groups, and must be granted to users for all enclosing containers (parent or folder objects) of the resource the user wants to access or manipulate.

Read, Write, and Grant are design-time privileges that determine access to objects for users of TDV and other TDV components.

Read, Execute, Select, Insert, Update, and Delete are run-time, data manipulation privileges that determine resource security for client-interface access to data through TDV.

The following tables describe what can and cannot be done with different combinations of privileges. In the table, an X means that the privilege is granted on the resource, and N/A means that the privilege is not applicable to the resource.

Column-bevel restrictions set in TDV exhibit different behavior when the resource is accessed through a client interface, depending on whether the restriction is set for a table or for a view.

Managing privilege settings for resources can become complex when many data resources contribute to the output of a resource. When resources use another resource, every prospective user and group must have adequate privileges to access and invoke those dependencies.

Even if a Studio developer has the privilege of using and viewing a dependency resource, that person might not be able to assign privileges on resource dependencies to other users and groups.

At run time, when using resources contained within other resources, the Read privilege must be present in all parent containers.

When a resource has a dependency, the user who requests the view or invokes the procedure must have privileges to view the dependency, and to Select or Execute to retrieve data from the dependent resource.

Note: You can use the lineage feature in Studio to learn about the resource relationships, dependencies, and references. See “Exploring Data Lineage” in the TDV User Guide.

For example, a user might want to see the data of View_A, where View_A executes Procedure_B (which draws on data from physical source Table_D) and also selects from physical source Table_C. To perform a SELECT on View_A, the user needs these privileges.

Privileges can be assigned to selected groups or individual users. Privileges can be set for an entire folder, including all child objects. Privileges let you restrict access and changes to data down to individual table columns.

When a privilege is granted to a user, the corresponding privilege check box is selected in the panel. See Container and Resource Privileges.

Individual LDAP users can be directly assigned rights and privileges for any resource, but only after they appear in the TDV system.

When designing client interface applications, you might experience difficulties with resource availability and access privileges if you do not have the necessary Read privileges. You must have Read privileges for all levels of the resource tree to enable clients to view and use a resource. Developers, resource owners, and administrators should work together to make sure that appropriate groups and users can both view and access contained resources.

For information on how to grant privileges to a source on which a resource depends, see Privileges Required for Resource Dependencies.

The privileges Insert, Update, Delete only need to be set for the top-level view—the view that is published to a virtual database. These privileges do not need to be set separately for other views in the dependency lineage.

Users who have Select, Insert, Update, and Delete privileges on a view, but do not have Read access on that view, can see the view when signed in to Studio, but if they try to open the view, an error message is displayed. After clicking OK in the error message box, they can open and execute the view in Studio, but they cannot save any changes to the view.

This topic describes privileges for users who do not use Studio to connect to TDV. One category of such users is those who connect to TDV through JDBC, ODBC, or ADO.NET. Insert, Update and Delete privileges are of course needed for such users to take those actions, but other conditions for these actions may not be as obvious:

Users or administrators who have the Grant privilege on resources can copy privilege settings from a selected resource to one or more other resources.

The dependency privilege analysis checks users and groups against all resources defined by the TDV Server. Specifically, it checks whether those with Select or Execute privileges also have the appropriate privileges to access and use dependency resources when they are present. The Dependency column displays an aggregate status icon that tells whether any dependency privilege settings need review and correction.

Administrative users with the Modify All Resources right can click in any box and thereby assign a privilege to all selected users and groups. Clicking on any box again sets the privilege back to its former state. You can click the ADD PERMISSIONS button to assign an explicit privilege to correct all resource dependency privilege deficiencies.

If the administrator currently using Manager does not have the Modify All Resources right, privilege changes are possible only on those resources and containers for which the administrator is the owner or has the Grant privilege.

The Manager Resources pages provide tools that automatically analyze privilege sets on resources and their dependencies for groups and users. TDV administrators can add or remove privileges with a single button click. They can analyze or edit dependency privileges, and view, edit, or remove privileges by resource, user, or group.

The Manager Resources pages let you do the following:

The Manager Resources pages are best used with the following administrative rights:

Note: Manager displayed in IE8 compatibility mode is slow. Also, IE8 warns that the JavaScript can cause the computer to become unresponsive. It is safe to ignore this warning. When using IE8, change the Refresh Rate.

The Dependency column displays:

Analyze Dependency Privileges analyzes all resources on the page for privilege settings.