Security system data model

JReport Server provides a database to hold registered users and permissions on report resources. This database will be used by the JReport Server Security Service to control access at runtime.

This diagram illustrates the data model used by the Security Service in JReport Server:

This shows the inherited relationship among User, Group and Role.

User data model

JReport Server defines these entities in the user model:

• Realm
  Realm is an abstract security concept, which hosts the resources and authentication entities on JReport Server. There can be more than one realm on the server and each realm is independent from others. The resources and authentication entities that reside in different realms are different.

  At runtime, only one realm can be active and only the users and resources in the active realm are accessible. A realm is identified by a unique name, which can contain any characters other than forward slash (/) and backward slash (\).

  The authentication entities consist of user accounts, group accounts and role accounts.

• User
  The user is the primary element of the database. It is a unique name that identifies a particular user of JReport Server.

  The JReport Server web pages are not accessible until a servlet session is established based on verification and login of a registered JReport Server user. All activity done during the web session will use that user identity when the Security Service is considering access privileges to report resources.

  JReport Server comes with two built-in users, admin and guest. The built-in user accounts cannot be deleted. The Admin user account can neither be deleted nor disabled.

• Group
  The principal group, which represents an organization of user accounts, is available for managing users. Users or groups can be added into a group as its child members, and therefore inherit the resource and folder permissions from the group.
• Role
  Users must have certain user rights and permissions in order to perform tasks on resources. Roles, which represent an aggregate of permissions, help you to efficiently assign the appropriate user rights and permissions to users. Assigning roles to users gives the users all of the user rights and permissions of the roles to perform their jobs with. A role can also be assigned to other groups or roles, and thus groups or roles can inherit the permissions of other roles. JReport Server comes with two built-in role accounts, administrators and everyone. The built-in role accounts cannot be deleted. The administrator role account can neither be deleted nor disabled.

Access control data model

Access control to report resources is based on this data model:

• Permission
  Permissions, associated with resources and folders, are the rules that are granted to users to control their access to the resources and folders.
• Privilege
  Privilege is a mode for managing permissions. It can be used to manage different access permissions unrelated with nodes. JReport Server offers these types of privileges for users: Publish and Advanced Properties. Users that are granted the Publish privilege will be able to publish resources to JReport Server, while users that have the privilege of Advanced Properties are allowed to view advanced information of version properties such as catalog connections and report related resources.
• Alias
  JReport Server organizes file and directories into a Resource Tree. Aliases are used to provide different "views" of a tree for different users to enter the Resource Tree. For example, you may set an alias resource tree (based on the resource tree) for Tanya, so that she can only see the market resource node and thus can directly walk into the report file she is interested in. In summary, an alias is a combination of users and resource nodes.

To manage JReport Server's built-in security, you must be a member of the administrator role in order to access the JReport Administration page.

Related topics:

• Managing security