Custom Roles

In this guide you’ll learn how to model custom roles in your system using OpenFGA. For example, a Business-to-Business (B2B) application could allow customers to create their own custom roles on the application to grant their users.

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Before you start

Before you start this guide, make sure you’re familiar with some OpenFGA Concepts and know how to develop the things listed below. To start, let’s say there is an application with a type called asset-category. Users can have view and/or edit access to assets in that category. Any user who can edit can also view.

Initial Model

We’ll start with the following authorization model showing a system with an asset-category type. This type allows users to have view and edit access to it.

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In addition, you’ll need to know the following:

Modeling Roles and Permissions

You need to know how to add users to groups and grant groups access to resources. Learn more →

Modeling Object-to-Object Relationships

You need to know how to create relationships between objects and how that might affect a user’s relationships to those objects. Learn more →

Concepts & Configuration Language

• OpenFGA Concepts
• Configuration Language

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Step By Step

Starting with the authorization model mentioned above, we want to enable users to create their own custom roles, and tie permissions to those roles to our two users and to the permissions on the logo asset category. For this guide, we’ll model a scenario where a certain organization using our app has created an asset-category called “logos”, and another called “text content”. The company administrator would like to create:

• a media-manager role that allows users to edit assets in the logos asset category
• a media-viewer role that allows users to view all assets in the logos asset category
• a blog-editor role that allows users to edit all assets in the text content asset category
• a blog-viewer role that allows users to view all assets in the text content asset category

Imagine these are what the permissions the roles in one organization using our service are like: Finally, the administrator wants to assign Anne the media-manager role and Beth the media-viewer role. At the end, we’ll verify our model by ensuring the following access check requests return the expected result. In order to do this, we need to:

1. Update the Authorization Model to add a Role Type
2. Use Relationship Tuples to tie the Users to the Roles
3. Use Relationship Tuples to associate Permissions with the Roles
4. Verify that the Authorization Model works

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01. Update The Authorization Model To Add A Role Type

Because our roles are going to be dynamic and might change frequently, we represent them in a new type instead of as relations on that same type. We’ll create new type called role, where users can be related as assignee to it. The authorization model becomes this: With this change we can add relationship tuples indicating that a certain user is assigned a certain role.

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02.Use Relationship Tuples To Tie The Users To The Roles

Once we’ve added the role type, we can assign roles to Anne and Beth. Anne is assigned the “media-manager” role and Beth is assigned the “media-viewer” role. We can do that by adding relationship tuples as follows: We can verify they are members of said roles by issuing the following check requests:

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03. Use Relationship Tuples To Associate Permissions With The Roles

With our users and roles set up, we still need to tie members of a certain role to it’s corresponding permission(s).

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04. Verify That The Authorization Model Works

To ensure our model works, it needs to match our expectations: The checks come back as we expect, so our model is working correctly.

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Related Sections

Check the following sections for more on how to model with OpenFGA.