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ECM: Document Level Security
The Tam Tam Blog mentioned an interesting discussion of Document Level Security in discussion by Mark Bennet at New Idea Engineering.
The search result of a document search needs to account for security levels assigned by ACLs to documents in the repository. A given user may be limited to access and search across certain documents.
Mark distinguishes between two approaches for document search when security is applied:
Early-Binding Security. In this scenario, the query to the back-end repository incorporates ACL permission conditions into the query. This efficiently only returns a set of documents appropriate for that user to see. No post-processing of the data prior to display to the user is required.
Late-Binding Security. In this scenario, after the user query is made against the repository, the returned result set is further post-processed to identify only those documents that the user has permission to see. This can obviously be a very time-consuming operation, depending on the number of hits in the query. And if not properly handled, can also cause problems in stating the total number of document hits and how paging between the document results is handled.
It’s a good article by Mark describing some of the low level considerations for how to construct the internals of a document/content repository. I was actually surprised to see in Mark’s list some companies that are not using “Early Binding”. The Formtek applications and SDK have always only exclusively used Early Binding.
