Managed roles

For information about internal authorization roles, and how IDM controls authorization to its own endpoints, refer to Authorization and roles.

Managed roles are defined like any other managed object, and are granted to users through the relationships mechanism. A managed role can be granted manually, as a static value of the user’s roles attribute, or dynamically, as a result of a condition or script. For example, a user might be granted a role such as sales-role dynamically, if that user is in the sales organization.

A user’s roles attribute takes an array of references as a value, where the references point to the managed roles. For example, if user bjensen has been granted two roles (employee and supervisor), the value of bjensen’s roles attribute would look something like the following:

"roles": [
  {
    "_ref": "managed/role/employee",
    "_refResourceCollection": "managed/role",
    "_refResourceId": "employee",
    "_refProperties": {
      "_grantType": "",
      "_id": "bb399428-21a9-4b01-8b74-46a7ac43e0be",
      "_rev": "00000000e43e9ba7"
    }
  },
  {
    "_ref": "managed/role/supervisor",
    "_refResourceCollection": "managed/role",
    "_refResourceId": "supervisor",
    "_refProperties": {
      "_grantType": "",
      "_id": "9f7d124b-c7b1-4bcf-9ece-db4900e37c31",
      "_rev": "00000000e9c19d26"
    }
  }
]

The _refResourceCollection is the container that holds the role. The _refResourceId is the ID of the role. The _ref property is a resource path that is derived from the _refResourceCollection and the URL-encoded _refResourceId. _refProperties provides more information about the relationship.

Some of the examples in this documentation set use client-assigned IDs (such as bjensen and scarter) for the user objects because it makes the examples easier to read. If you create objects using the admin UI, they are created with server-assigned IDs (such as 55ef0a75-f261-47e9-a72b-f5c61c32d339). This particular example uses a client-assigned role ID that is the same as the role name. All other examples in this chapter use server-assigned IDs. Generally, immutable server-assigned UUIDs are used for all managed objects in production environments.

IDM 7.3.1

Managed roles