The Rules of Visibility and Data persistency entitlements modules are used to assign what the user is entitled to view,
add, and update.
These entitlements depend on the data values on a transactional
basis, rather than which transactions the user can execute. The rules
are defined in the System Maintenance Security option.
The two types of data level entitlements discussed in this manual, Data persistency entitlements and Rules of Visibility, are closely linked. The Rules of Visibility (RoV) module allows administrators to define what elements and sub-elements
users and user groups can see based on defined constraints. At runtime,
the rules are evaluated at post-transaction, and transaction data
sets are filtered based on the defined rules. For more information
about defining RoV, see the developer documentation.
The Data persistency entitlements module allows administrators to define the elements and sub-elements
that users and user groups can add and update, based on defined constraints.
At run time, the rules are evaluated pre-transaction to determine
if the user has been entitled to add or update the data within the
transaction set based on the defined rules.
You can control who sees what and who can add persistent data to
a record using data level entitlements, set though the
Rules of Visibility and access tokens. Data level entitlements are rules that dictate
whether or not a user can view or persist certain sets of data.
InfoSphere® MDM defines two categories of
Data persistency entitlements:
- Rules of Visibility entitlements, which control the data that a user is allowed
to view based on the defined rules and constraints.
- Data persistency entitlements, which control the data that a user is allowed to add or update
based on the defined rules and constraints.
The use of these two types of entitlements is sometimes referred
to as
row and column level security because both the
instance of data and the type of data is considered. An example of
controlled instance of data would be where one category manager is
not allowed to view a specific categories because those categories
are managed by a different category manager. An example of controlled
type of data would be where a given user is not given permission to
view category relationships and category codes for all categories.
InfoSphere MDM processes entitlements at two levels. The first is at
the database level, which is referred to as Accessibility. For
Rules of Visibility, this provides database-level filtering of data based on access
tokens. The second level is in the data-level entitlements engine.
For
Rules of Visibility this provides post-inquiry filtering of data based on more
complex rules and constraints; for
Data persistency entitlements this ensures that the user is entitled to make adds or updates
to that entity, prior to invoking calls on the database. These two
levels, or mechanisms, should be considered together when deriving
a strategy around data level entitlements. For example, the Accessibility
mechanism can provide a coarse-grained filtering of data that a user
has access to in a high performing manner, followed by additional
filtering by the
Rules of Visibility engine, which applies a more complex logic that is not suited
or possible to contain in database queries.