Deploying access control policies

Access control is crucial to any business, and is especially important if you plan to customize access control policies. Ensure that you are familiar with WebSphere Commerce access control. An access control policy authorizes a group of users to perform a set of actions on a set of resources within WebSphere Commerce. Unless authorized through one or more access control policies, users have no access to any functions of the system.

About this task

The WebSphere Commerce acpload utility loads the XML files containing the main access control policies into the appropriate databases.

If you deploy access control policies, note the following items:

Procedure

  1. Update the target database. Your target WebSphere Commerce Server can use a different database than your development machine. If this is the case, you must perform all updates that were done to the development database on the database that is used by the target WebSphere Commerce Server. This includes any updates for the registration of new or modified commands or views, additional tables that have been created, and the creation of access control policies for any new resources that have been created.
  2. Be familiar with access control updates. While access control information is contained in the database, this is a special type of information that is not always a straight replication from the development environment to the target environment. In particular, in the development environment, you can decide to use very liberal access control policies that are not appropriate for a production (or next level of testing) environment. As an example, within the confines of the development environment, policies for new commands could be set such that all users can execute the command, but this is not always appropriate elsewhere.

    As a result, before copying access control information from the development to target environment, you should consider the access control requirements in the new environment and adjust your policies accordingly.

Results

For information about loading access control policies (including command syntax for various platforms and directory permission requirements), refer to Loading access control policy data.