Sharing

Plone comes with a sophisticated user management system that allows an administrator to assign users and groups with global roles and permissions. Sometimes this in not enough though and you might want to give users the permission to access or edit a specific part of your website or a specific content object. This is where local roles, located in the Plone Sharing tab, come in handy.

Retrieving Local Roles

In plone.restapi, the representation of any content object will include a hypermedia link to the local role and sharing information in the sharing attribute:

GET /plone/folder HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json

HTTP 200 OK
content-type: application/json

{
  "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/folder",
  "@type": "Folder",

  "more attributes": "...",

  "sharing": {
    "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/folder/@sharing",
    "title": "Sharing",
  }
}

The sharing information of a content object can also be directly accessed by appending /@sharing to the GET request to the URL of a content object. For example, to access the sharing information for a top-level folder, do the following.

http

GET /plone/folder/@sharing HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46c2VjcmV0

curl

curl -i -X GET http://nohost/plone/folder/@sharing -H "Accept: application/json" --user admin:secret

httpie

http http://nohost/plone/folder/@sharing Accept:application/json -a admin:secret

python-requests

requests.get('http://nohost/plone/folder/@sharing', headers={'Accept': 'application/json'}, auth=('admin', 'secret'))

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "available_roles": [
        {
            "id": "Contributor",
            "title": "Can add"
        },
        {
            "id": "Editor",
            "title": "Can edit"
        },
        {
            "id": "Reader",
            "title": "Can view"
        },
        {
            "id": "Reviewer",
            "title": "Can review"
        }
    ],
    "entries": [
        {
            "disabled": false,
            "id": "AuthenticatedUsers",
            "login": null,
            "roles": {
                "Contributor": false,
                "Editor": false,
                "Reader": false,
                "Reviewer": false
            },
            "title": "Logged-in users",
            "type": "group"
        }
    ],
    "inherit": true
}

The available_roles property contains the list of roles that can be managed via the sharing page. It contains dictionaries with the role ID and its translated title as it appears on the sharing page.

Searching for principals

Users or groups without a sharing entry can be found by appending the argument search to the query string, in other words, ?search=admin. Global roles are marked with the string global. Inherited roles are marked with the string acquired:

http

GET /plone/folder/doc/@sharing?search=admin HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46c2VjcmV0

curl

curl -i -X GET 'http://nohost/plone/folder/doc/@sharing?search=admin' -H "Accept: application/json" --user admin:secret

httpie

http 'http://nohost/plone/folder/doc/@sharing?search=admin' Accept:application/json -a admin:secret

python-requests

requests.get('http://nohost/plone/folder/doc/@sharing?search=admin', headers={'Accept': 'application/json'}, auth=('admin', 'secret'))

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "available_roles": [
        {
            "id": "Contributor",
            "title": "Can add"
        },
        {
            "id": "Editor",
            "title": "Can edit"
        },
        {
            "id": "Reader",
            "title": "Can view"
        },
        {
            "id": "Reviewer",
            "title": "Can review"
        }
    ],
    "entries": [
        {
            "id": "Administrators",
            "login": null,
            "roles": {
                "Contributor": false,
                "Editor": false,
                "Reader": false,
                "Reviewer": false
            },
            "title": "Administrators",
            "type": "group"
        },
        {
            "disabled": false,
            "id": "AuthenticatedUsers",
            "login": null,
            "roles": {
                "Contributor": false,
                "Editor": false,
                "Reader": false,
                "Reviewer": false
            },
            "title": "Logged-in users",
            "type": "group"
        },
        {
            "id": "Site Administrators",
            "login": null,
            "roles": {
                "Contributor": false,
                "Editor": false,
                "Reader": false,
                "Reviewer": false
            },
            "title": "Site Administrators",
            "type": "group"
        },
        {
            "disabled": true,
            "id": "admin",
            "roles": {
                "Contributor": "global",
                "Editor": "acquired",
                "Reader": false,
                "Reviewer": false
            },
            "title": "admin",
            "type": "user"
        }
    ],
    "inherit": true
}

Updating Local Roles

You can update the sharing information by sending a POST request to the object URL and appending /@sharing, for example, /plone/folder/@sharing. Say you want to give the AuthenticatedUsers group the Reader local role for a folder:

http

POST /plone/folder/@sharing HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46c2VjcmV0
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "entries": [
        {
            "id": "AuthenticatedUsers",
            "roles": {
                "Contributor": false,
                "Editor": false,
                "Reader": true,
                "Reviewer": true
            },
            "type": "user"
        }
    ],
    "inherit": true
}

curl

curl -i -X POST http://nohost/plone/folder/@sharing -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data-raw '{"entries": [{"id": "AuthenticatedUsers", "roles": {"Contributor": false, "Editor": false, "Reader": true, "Reviewer": true}, "type": "user"}], "inherit": true}' --user admin:secret

httpie

echo '{
  "entries": [
    {
      "id": "AuthenticatedUsers",
      "roles": {
        "Contributor": false,
        "Editor": false,
        "Reader": true,
        "Reviewer": true
      },
      "type": "user"
    }
  ],
  "inherit": true
}' | http POST http://nohost/plone/folder/@sharing Accept:application/json Content-Type:application/json -a admin:secret

python-requests

requests.post('http://nohost/plone/folder/@sharing', headers={'Accept': 'application/json', 'Content-Type': 'application/json'}, json={'entries': [{'id': 'AuthenticatedUsers', 'roles': {'Contributor': False, 'Editor': False, 'Reader': True, 'Reviewer': True}, 'type': 'user'}], 'inherit': True}, auth=('admin', 'secret'))

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content