Skip to content

Roles and Grants

CEDAR uses roles, grants and ownership to define who may access and control artifacts, folders and groups.

Artifacts and Folders

CEDAR has three roles for access to artifacts and folders. Each role can be assigned to a user or group. Each role provides a defined set of capabilities on the artifact or folder. The tables below show the capabilities provided by each role for each resource type.

Artifact Capabilities

Capability Viewer Editor Manager
Read the artifact and its descriptive metadata
Change the artifact's content or descriptive metadata
Delete the artifact
Change who has the Viewer, Editor or Manager role
Move the artifact
Enable or disable OpenView for the resource

Folder Capabilities

Capability Viewer Editor Manager
Read the folder and its descriptive metadata
View resources contained in the folder
Change the folder's descriptive metadata
Create a resource in the folder
Copy a resource into the folder
Delete the folder
Change who has the Viewer, Editor or Manager role
Move the folder
Enable or disable OpenView for the folder

The roles are cumulative. Editor includes every Viewer action. Manager includes every Editor action.

Assigning Viewer, Editor or Manager to a user or group on one artifact or folder is called a direct grant.

The owner is the single user recorded as responsible for the resource. The owner has every Manager capability. The owner alone can transfer ownership to another user. The transfer makes the other user the owner. The previous owner no longer owns the resource.

The Editor/Manager boundary is deliberate. A user with the Editor role on a resource may change its content but may not change which users or groups can access it. Changing that access requires the Manager role on the resource or ownership of the resource.

When a user or group is given a role on a folder, that role also applies to every resource the folder contains, including resources inside nested folders.

Groups

Groups have a separate Group Administrator role. The table below compares the capabilities of every group member with the additional capabilities provided by this role.

Group capability Member Group Administrator
View the group's name
View the group's members and administrators
Change the group's name
Add or remove members
Add or remove a Group Administrator role

Membership is not a role. Every Group Administrator is also a member. A Group Administrator therefore has every member capability.

A grant to a group applies to every current member of that group. A user added to the group gains the access given to the group. A user removed from the group loses the access received through the group. Another grant may still provide that user with access.

The built-in Everyone group can be assigned the Viewer role. It cannot be assigned the Editor role or the Manager role. Assigning the Viewer role to the Everyone group gives every authenticated CEDAR user Viewer access. It does not give access to people who are not signed in. Access for people who are not signed in is controlled separately through OpenView.