Tutorial: Defining write usage in Management Center

In this tutorial, you define a usage policy to determine whether a user has write access to instances of a business object. You create a Search Term Manager role that has write access to the search term association objects in the Catalogs tool. You can refer to Tutorial: Creating a user with the Recipe Manager role as a reference.

Management Center uses the usage policy to determine whether to display the menu item. The usage policy conveys how information is used by the client. An access control check is performed based on the usage information provided. You might want to limit the access of some business user roles. For example, you want a workspace Task Group Approver to have read-only access to some objects that are loaded by the Management Center framework. Use the tool level usage parameter to determine access to the tool for a user. Use the object level writeUsage parameter to determine write access to instances of the business object for a user.

usage: The usage attribute is specified in the definition of the application menu item. This attribute denotes the name of the usage policy that is used to determine access to the menu item in the Management Center. If there are no stores available to the user for a tool, that tool does not appear in the application menu. Once the tool is opened, the store selection drop-down menu populates with stores that match the current user and usage.

writeUsage: The writeUsage attribute is specified in the object definition. This attribute denotes the name of the usage policy that is used to determine whether the user has write access to instances of the business object. If the user does not have write access, the object is in read-only state. If the writeusage attribute is not specified in the object definition, then the usage that is specified for the tool is used. The user that has access to the tool also has write access to instances of the business object.

Learning objectives

After completing this tutorial, you should be able to perform the following tasks:

Create a role in Management Center.
Create a user and assign the new role to the user.
Assign roles access to specific business tools.
Update user groups for write access.
Create access control policies for write usage.

Time required

This tutorial takes approximately 60 minutes to finish. If you explore other concepts that are related to this tutorial, the tutorial takes longer to complete.

Skill level

Advanced

Audience

This tutorial is intended for advanced WebSphere Commerce developers responsible for customizing the Management Center user interface.

Tutorial resources

Download the following file into a temporary directory in your development environment. This file includes the source code that is used in this tutorial for use as a reference.

WriteUsage_sourcecode.zip

Results

After you complete this tutorial, you can open the Catalogs tool, edit search term association objects, but cannot edit other business objects that are in read-only mode.