I’ve been thinking about the web app I’m about to begin developing and wondering whether my usual approach could be improved.
In my last few apps I’ve created a table (see below) of roles (such as CREATE POST, EDIT POST etc.) which each have a bitfield applied to them so I can simply assign a user certain rights in registration and check them later on (e.g. $user->hasRight(CREATE_POST)).
I’m wondering if there’s a better approach to this. It’s certainly confusing when the rights aren’t specifically linked to the user (I could have a table where each right is a boolean column but that only sounds like a small improvement) – and what happens if I change some around?
I’m not looking to use standard libraries (the app itself is a learning experience for me: using postgresql, git etc.) although I’m perfectly happy to take inspiration from them to construct my own – so if there’s something special you think I should take a look at please say so 🙂
That’s basically the same approach I take in my own web apps (and a bit of trial and error has gone into that for me). The only difference is, I’d probably use a table which has the different permissions as columns, so that if you want to add more permissions later on, you can. Using bits in an integer limits you to a fixed number of permissions, namely as many bits as there are in the integer. Typically that would be 32 which I suppose is probably enough, but I prefer not to limit myself that way.
For what it’s worth, that’s also the model that phpBB uses (permissions as table columns), and if it’s good enough for arguably the most popular PHP web app, it’s probably good enough for you 😉