Question

I am working on a web-app system that has multiple apps, each with a Primary Key to identify them. Each user also has a security level tied to an app, for instance App #1 with a security level of 5. I want to store all the app / security information in the database as a token, and then retrieve that information to store it in Session.

So given the following apps:

1. Task App
2. Email App
3. Notes App

and a user that has security level 3, 5, and 7 respectively, the token will be stored as:

1.3|2.5|3.7.

My question is, how do I retrieve that data in a usable form? I was thinking of having it in an array, with the array key of the App ID, like somearray[1] = 3, somearray[2] = 5, etc, but I have no idea how to handle this.

I’m early in development on this part, so I have a very open mind towards suggestions. Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

the token will be stored as:

1.3|2.5|3.7.

Why don’t you store security levels in a database ? It will be much more easy to manage. I could imagine few tables like the following:

App
--------
id
name
....

Users
--------
id
name
email
...

App_users_permissions
--------
id
app_id (references App.id)
user_id (references Users.id)
level

Then, you could do a simple query like:

SELECT level FROM App_users_permissions WHERE user_id = 1 AND app_id = 2

This query would then return the current previlege id, for a given app id and user id.

I think that would be the easiest way to manage this.