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Wrapping my head around object level permissions with Django

A quick aside, if you read my SQL stuff – I have been working on a side project with python, Django (a web framework), with a focus on bringing some sanity to recipes.

For the site I needed to implement a system where a user owns recipes, and other users cant modify them.

In Django there’s a built in auth model that supports both user registration and model level permissions(yay!), but it means that naively all users could edit all recipes(boo!)

I did some quick searching because I was hopeful that I could reuse some of the well thought out components already available.

The big options I found were django-guardian, Rules, django-rest, or figuring it out myself.

Checking in with Rules, it looks like its not so much a Django specific implementation as much as a way to implement rules + predicates to get things done, seems interesting but its not clear from the older examples provided how its supposed to work with a modern Django – I am going to skip it for now.

Checking in with django-guardian, I am seeing better examples that are relevant, but truthfully I need 1 owner as a permission.

On the face of it, I feel like a lot of these systems are really complex for my purposes – its cool to be the ultimate system but I just need a system that provides:

  1. Users which have permission to objects.
  2. Permissions means you have all roles on the object (edit/delete.)
  3. Each object that is ownable on creation must have a creator/author, who when its assigned can automatically edit/delete the thing.

Since I don’t need a complex permission system, I don’t care about meta-magic, and I just want to design a straight forward set of gates to manage, I decided to go off on my own and work on implementing an author that’s checked.

I added an author field to my model, the current user sets it in the model if its not already set, and then I use the is_current_authenticated_user() function from the django-currentuser package to tell if this matches the current request.

I also implemented a simple map behind the scenes that connects forms to models to pages so that the add/edit functions can just do their work and pass the correct set of forms back to the correct set of pages – I will have to keep looking because it wasnt clear how to infer the model’s form class automatically without some mightier python than I current posses.

I disable the form fields for niceties in the UI if you don’t own the object (so you dont accidentally try and edit it), but to be sure I also prevent saving on the backend if things don’t match up, and there’s an added bonus of free CSRF built into Django.

And so after all that I have straight forward solution without even touching the rules code – it took me more time to noodle over third party options than just set down and write it.

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