DB Changes

[Jason Pincin <jpincin@ashtech.net>]

Well - 

The new DB structure has been in place for a few days now.  I'm feverishly
working on fixing things I've broken.  And I'm anxiously awaiting the
questions from this list that I've anticipated.  So please - nail me with
them :)

Aaron & Micah:

There is another minimal change I want to make.  Don't yell at me.  Just
listen a second :)

It does affect the two of you in a very minor way.  It related to RoleID
in the Users table.  Instead of Micah dumping in a default value of 1 or
whatever into that during user Signup, I want to change that field name to
"Location", and just have Micah dump a default location value into it
instead.  The permissions in the DB will then be assigned to the location
of the user in the tree.  This has no impact on ANYTHIN developed thus far
except for the name of the field, and what value Micah submits.  Should
only take a few seconds for him to change.

It also affects your ModPerl security design Aaron.  But not too much.
Instead of looking for a value of 1 in a field named RoleID - you'll be
looking for a value such as "2.20" in a field called "Location".  

As you can see - it's prolly a few minutes worth of changes across
everyone's time.  But, as a result - users are completely integrated to
the object tree in the backend DB, and security would be able to be much
more flexible.  It replaces Roles with Groups.  

Permissions on a user could still be looked up in a single one table query
this way.  To look all permissions assigned to a user, you simply:

select * from Permissions where ObjectID = 2 or ObjectID = 20

The where clause is generated dynamicly by split() 'ing the location
string of the user based on ".".  Another example:

User has location "2.20.97"

2 = Root os user tree.  20 = A group.  97 = the object representing the
user in the tree.  By performing the query above where OID = 2 or OID = 20
or OID = 97 you get the permissions assigned to the user, the group he
belongs to, and all users (if we do such a thing).  Permissions by
inheritence.  It's a beutiful thing.

I know we're concentrating on go-live.  And I don't want to change the
backend unless needed.  But this change should only require a few minutes
of time on the part of Aaron and Micah.  And a few minutes on my part.
Lets go ahead and do this.

Jason