Managing Group Memberships in Unifier
Simplifying Bulk Access Control Administration
Primavera Unifier has a powerful security model that can be challenging to administer. It allows modeling roles by using groups and assigns roles to users by adding them to those groups. In addition, permissions can be granted to groups. The thing that makes it difficult to administer is that each project and shell has its own groups.
Membership of the groups must be managed in each individual project. Assignment of permissions to groups must also be managed in each individual project. With a large number of projects or users, this can make administering user privileges a daunting and time-consuming task.
To somewhat ease this burden for our own internal operations, I developed a script that took the group memberships for a template user and copied them in bulk into all of the users who needed the same memberships. In the Unifier instance in question, this script created almost 30,000 memberships in just a few seconds. This would have been prohibitively time-consuming, expensive, and error prone if done by hand.
About the Author
Dan MacMillan - Integration Specialist
Dan has been developing software professionally for over 20 years, joining Emerald Associates in 2003. His experience includes accounting, supply chain management, drilling program management, project management, and contract management integration, automation and dashboarding elements.
Dan learned how to program computers as a child by watching his older brother making games on his Commodore 64. His interest in computers and programming drove him to teach himself BASIC, 6502 and 80386 assembly language programming, and then C so that he could write hobby programs. Moving from hobby to professional, Dan did his computer science studies at SAIT in Calgary.
In his first professional programming job, Dan had the autonomy to make mistakes, live with them, learn from them and fix them. He realized that quality in software derives, not from what it does, but from the way it is written, and yields benefits such as having fewer bugs, and being easier to read and change. On that project, Dan transitioned from programming hobbyist to craftsman with a “quality first” focus in his work.