[CalendarServer-users] Principal URL vs. Alternate URIs vs. Calendar User addresses

Cyrus Daboo cdaboo at apple.com
Wed Nov 7 06:39:18 PST 2007


Hi Frank,

--On November 7, 2007 3:24:19 PM +0100 Frank Strauß 
<strauss at ibr.cs.tu-bs.de> wrote:

> When I use URIs like the "Principal URL" for ACL configuration, it seems
> to work as expected. However, it would be nice, if more verbose
> addresses like "/principals/users/brandt/" would also work.
>
> I think a mapping from any of the alternate addresses to the UUID could
> and should be done before it gets applied to an ACL. What do you think?

The principal-URL is the identifier used for ACL operations as per the 
WebDAV ACL spec. Our principal-URLs are guaranteed to be unique as they are 
GUIDs for each principal. Thus, of a login id (short name, uid) is re-used 
for a different user (as can happen over time as users come and go) the new 
user will have a different principal-URL and thus won't be able to access 
any of the data for the old user that may still be around.

So on our system, principals are all listed under /principals. Within that 
we have users, groups, resources and locations which contain resources 
named for the uid/short name of each principal of the corresponding type - 
those are not guaranteed to be unique over time. Then we also have __uids__ 
in /principals. That contains a list of all the unique principal resources.

It is certainly painful to have to type in the __uids__ variant by hand - 
but really your tool should/could do the mapping from the more friendly 
"short name" principal path to the principal-URL for you. i.e. you type in 
/principals/users/cdaboo, and your tool maps that to the principal-URL 
property on that resource. Same thing when viewing ACLs, the tool can map 
the principal-URL path to anyone of the alternate-URIs - or perhaps even 
better to the displayname property.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo



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