Thursday, November 19, 2009

Mapping UI controls to entitlements/operations

In RBAC, we often need to enable/disable a UI control based on the users role and entitlements. Most programmers write code for mapping a UI control with the operation name, i.e. if 'submitRecord' is not allowed for the user, then disable or hide the button.

Recently I came across a neat way to handle this using attributes in C#.NET. This article describes the use of attributes to specify the 'operationName' and the 'property-value' to be set on the control when we check for entitlements.
Example code snippet:
[YourCompany.Authorization("EditSalary", "ReadOnly", true)]
private System.Windows.Forms.TextBox Salary;


Though the example is that of a .NET program, the same concept can easily be applied in Java 5, which supports annotations. Annotations in Java are roughly equivalent to Attributes in .NET.

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