Question

I have an issue with creating my User Roles in a custom authorisation implementation.
Unfutunately I’m dealing with a really badly designed legacy database which is used by other applications, and I don’t really want to have to re-code the database and the other applications.

Below I have listed how I would like my User and UserPermissionGroup classes to look.

public class User
{
  public virtual int Id { get; set; }
  public virtual int Name { get; set; }
  public virtual int Email { get; set; }
  public virtual int Password { get; set; }

  protected virtual IEnumerable<UserPermissionGroup> PermissionGroups { get; set; }

  public virtual book IsInRole(string role)
  {
    // code to check with PermissionGroups if user is in one of the required roles
  }
}

public class UserPermissionGroup
{
  public virtual string Role { get; set; }
  public virtual bool CanAccess { get; set; }
  public virtual string SiteCode { get; set; } // optional field - depends on perm type in DB
}

And unfortunately my (abbreviated) database structure looks like:

People
{
  ID (PK, int)
  Name (varchar)
  Email (varchar)
  Password (varchar)

  PeopleTypeId (FK, int)
  IsSuperAdmin (bit)
  IsSiteAdmin (bit)
  IsUserAdmin (bit)
}

PeopleTypes
{
  PeopleTypeId (PK, int)
  TypeName (varchar)
}

Perm2People
{
  PeopleId (PK, FK, int)
  GroupID (PK, FK, int)
}

PermGroups
{
  GroupID (PK, int)
  GroupName (varchar)
}


Perms4Sites
{
  PeopleID (PK, FK, int)
  SiteCode (PK, FK, char(3))
  Section (PK, char(1))
  AccessLevel (int) 
}

In Perms4Sites:

• SiteCode relates to one of the sites that the Admin area is managing.
• Section is a 1 character code for different parts of the admin (which relates to the Roles)
• AccessLevel 0-3 depending on how much permissions a person has to that section (ie read, write, publish). At the moment we don’t need to know what level of access soemone has – just if they have anything other than 0.

I would like to add mappings for all the permission type tables (and rows from the People table) into the one UserPermissionGroup class. I only need to read these tables – no writing to the DB required.

Does anyone know how to write a mapping for this DB structure into something more useful like my ideal class schema above?

Thanks for any help
Saan

Answer 1

A colleague of mine pointed out that I was making this way too complicated, and I should just write a sql view for all the mappings.