best practices for checking a related document for access info

[Seung Chan Lim]

I have the following two types of documents 

1. space

2. conversation: "space" attribute points to the _id of space

Whenever a conversation starts, a new doc of type "conversation" is created and its attribute "space" contains the _id of a doc of type "space"

What I want to ensure in my sync function is that the user creating a "conversation" document has access to the "space" document pointed.

I originally thought to simply do requireAccess(doc.space) when a conversation doc is created/updated and make sure to do channel(doc._id) and a access(doc.owner, doc._id) when a space doc is created/updated.

But then I wanted to have public spaces, which anyone has access to. In other words, even if the user isn't explicitly given a access to the channel, I was hoping requireAccess would pass if the document is "public."

I thought I could do this by doing access("GUEST", doc._id) when a space doc is created/updated but that doesn't seem to work.

Is this even possible?

slim

[Seung Chan Lim]

What I'm leaning toward is just creating a EVERYONE role, then adding any new user to that role.

Then giving any public space provide access to that role.

I guess that's the way?

slim

[Jens Alfke]

On Oct 21, 2015, at 2:36 PM, Seung Chan Lim <djs...@gmail.com> wrote:

I thought I could do this by doing access("GUEST", doc._id) when a space doc is created/updated but that doesn't seem to work.

It doesn’t work because GUEST is a specific account used for requests without authorization. So changing the properties of that account doesn’t affect the properties of other accounts.

Your other approach of using a special role everyone’s added to sounds good.

—Jens

[James Nocentini]

Another way could be to map the public documents to the built-in ! channel (called the public channel) because the GUEST user and all registered users have access to that channel by default.
I recorded a screencast about this use case that might help http://blog.couchbase.com/2015/november/exploring-the-public-and-user-channels-in-couchbase-sync-gateway

James