Question

Scenario: I need to create a report for the auditors for an ASP.Net application. I have a program that parses the XML of the web.config files in a directory for the authorization tag and creates a report providing which users have access to which folder in the site structure. The report is shown below.

UserName, Firstname, LastName, Directory, Roles, Access,
LastLoginDate

Problem: As you can see from the report some directories (the middle column with GISMO in it) show up twice, with both allow and deny for a user. I am wondering if there is a way to group the results in such a way that if there is a row that has allow for a directory then the deny’s are not shown but otherwise they are.

Alternatively if this can be manipulated in VB.net/C# that is also an option. It comes back there and is pumped into an Excel spreadsheet.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Edit: I should have explained better. I still need the deny rows to show if the user isn’t allowed in the directory. But if they are allowed then there is no point showing the deny rows.

Answer 1

Something like this should work but this assumes that your paths were not entered such as /directory/directory/, /directory/Directory/, directory/directory/default.aspx, etc. Your best bet would be to parse the data and remove duplicates at the .NET process level you’ve created, since parsing at that stage is usually easier.

select derived.*,
       case when exists 
         (select top 1 1 from table_name as t2 where t2.username = derived.username and t2.directory=derived.directory and t2.access = 'allow') then 1 else 0 end as is_allowed,
       case when exists 
         (select top 1 1 from table_name as t2 where t2.username = derived.username and t2.directory=derived.directory and t2.access = 'deny') then 1 else 0 end as is_denied,
from
(
 select distinct t.username, t.firstname, t.lastname, t.directory
  from table_name as t
) as derived