Get the list of indirect relationships

[vhpoet]

I have the below DSL

type customer
  relations
    define customer_admin as self
type user
  relations
    define parent as self
type document
  relations
    define admin as customer_admin from parent
    define parent as self

and these tuples

{
  "user": "customer:acme",
  "relation": "parent",
  "object": "document:a"
},
{
  "user": "customer:acme",
  "relation": "parent",
  "object": "document:b"
},
{
  "user": "customer:acme",
  "relation": "parent",
  "object": "user:john"
},
{
  "user": "user:john",
  "relation": "customer_admin",
  "object": "customer:acme"
}

• customer:acme has a parent relationship with user:john, document:a and document:b.
• user:john has a customer_admin relationship with customer:acme.
• user:john has an indirect admin relationship with document:a and document:b.

Given the situation above, what's the best way to get the list of the documents user:john has a direct and indirect admin relationship with?

I might be missing something, but I couldn't find a nice way of doing this. What's the general thinking around this? Do I have to replicate some of the relationships in my own database? Are there any resources / best practices I can look at?

Thank you!

[rhamzeh]

Hey @vhpoet - thanks for asking!

We list a bit of our thought process on this in the Search with Permissions document.

TLDR - It depends on:

• Number of objects that your database can return from a search query
• Number of objects of a certain type the user could have access to
• Percentage of objects in a type the user could have access to

For some of those cases, we have an experimental endpoint called ListObjects, which given a type, a relation and a user, returns a list of object ids the user can access.

Note that the current approach is experimental and not ready for production use, and comes with a few caveats including subpar latency at scale. Though we are working on optimizing it and having it production ready as soon as we can.

[vhpoet]

Thanks for the quick response! I read that page last week and forgot about it 🤦‍♂️.