In the Dynamo User Directory, users may belong to organizations, and organizations may belong to parent organizations. For example, you could have an organization that represents your company and children organizations that represent the various departments within the company. An organization can be any object you’d like to represent in the user directory. You don’t have to assign users to an organization, although you can use organizations to group users. In the user directory UI, users who are assigned to an organization are called members of that organization.

Users, organizations, and roles are all considered examples of principals. Principals are logical identities that may be granted or denied access rights in various Oracle Commerce Platform security domains. In this way, user directories provide a uniform way for Oracle Commerce Platform security models to look at a user and to understand the user from a security point of view.

You can assign roles to users and to organizations. Roles define actions that users can take or positions that they hold. For example, you can assign someone the role of “buyer” within a specific organization. Buyers may have access to certain repository items, and you can easily group together all users who have the role “buyer.” You could also assign someone the role “VP of Sales.” This role is a little different because you probably would assign this role to only one user. You can specify access rights for a role. For example, perhaps the role “VP of Sales” has the ability to view and to edit the profiles of all the users who have the role “buyer.”

In addition, you can assign roles to organizations. For example, you could assign an organization in the user directory the role of “Partner,” and you can specify that partners have access to certain repository items. Users who belong to an organization can inherit that organization’s role. Roles can be one of two types:

The following figure illustrates the relationships within a user directory:

This diagram is described in preceding text

In this figure, the User, Role, and Organization objects are all Principal objects. In this example, the user is assigned a global role and inherits the OrganizationalRole, which is a role that pertains to a specific organization. The organization may inherit characteristics from its parent organization. A user directory doesn’t need to support all the possibilities detailed in this diagram. It can contain any subset that you decide upon. For example, the concept of relative roles might be absent from a user directory.

While users and organizations are usually RepositoryItem objects, groups and roles are usually objects of other types. You can determine the PrincipalType of each Principal object. Available types are user, organization, and role. The determination of a PrincipalType of a principal object is internal to the user directory. You can, however, examine a Principal object within the user directory and determine that it is a RepositoryItem or another dynamic bean and modify that object accordingly.

The following figure is an example of an organizational scheme:

This diagram is described in surrounding text

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