When we update any tuple in the relation which authorization on a relation allow a user to?

note

Auth0 Fine Grained Authorization (FGA) is the early-stage product we are building at Auth0 to solve fine-grained authorization at scale. Sign up for the Developer Community Preview to try it out, and join our Discord community if you are interested in learning more about our plans.

Please note that at this point in time, it is not considered production-ready and does not come with any SLAs; availability and uptime are not guaranteed. Limitations of Auth0 FGA during the Developer Community Preview can be found here.

In this short guide, you'll learn how to represent a concentric relationships.

For example, if you want to have all editors of a document also be viewers of said document.

When to use

Concentric relations make the most sense when your domain logic has nested relations, where one having relation implies having another relation.

For example:

• all editors are viewers
• all managers are members
• all device_managers are device_renamers

This allows you to only create a single relationship tuple rather than creating n relationship tuples for each relation.

Before you start​

To better understand this guide, you should be familiar with some Auth0 FGA Concepts and know how to develop the things listed below.

You will start with the authorization model below, it represents a document type that can have users related as editor and viewer.

Let us also assume that we have a document called "meeting_notes.doc" and bob is assigned as editor to this document.

• DSL
• JSON

type document
relations
define viewer as self
define editor as self

The current state of the system is represented by the following relationship tuples being in the system already:

[
{
"user": "bob",
"relation": "editor",
"object": "document:meeting_notes.doc",
},
]

In addition, you will need to know the following:

Modeling User Groups​

You need to know how to add users to groups and grant groups access to resources. Learn more →

Auth0 FGA Concepts​

• A Type: a class of objects that have similar characteristics
• A User: an entity in the system that can be related to an object
• A Relation: is a string defined in the type definition of an authorization model that defines the possibility of a relationship between objects of this type and other users in the system
• An Object: represents an entity in the system. Users' relationships to it can be define through relationship tuples and the authorization model
• A Relationship Tuple: a grouping consisting of a user, a relation and an object stored in Auth0 FGA

Step by Step​

With the current type definition, there isn't a way to indicate that all editors of a certain document are also automatically viewers of that document. So for a certain user, in order to indicate that they can both edit and view a certain document, two relationship tuples need to be created (one for editor, and another for viewer).

01. Modify our model to imply editor as viewer​

Instead of creating two relationship tuples, we can leverage concentric relationships by defining editors are viewers.

Our authorization model becomes the following:

• DSL
• JSON

type document
relations
define viewer as self or editor
define editor as self

info

viewer of a document are any of:

1. users that are directly assigned as viewer
2. users that have editor of the document

With this authorization model change, having an editor relationship with a certain document implies having a viewer relationship with that same document.

02. Check that editors are viewers​

Since we had a relationship tuple that indicates that bob is an editor of document:meeting_notes.doc, this means bob is now implicitly a viewer of document:meeting_notes.doc. If we now check: is bob a viewer of document:meeting_notes.doc? we would get the following:

• Node.js
• Go
• .NET
• curl
• Pseudocode
• Playground

Initialize the SDK

// FGA_ENVIRONMENT can be "us" (default if not set) for Developer Community Preview or "playground" for the Playground API
// import the SDK
const { Auth0FgaApi } = require('@auth0/fga');

// Initialize the SDK
const fgaClient = new Auth0FgaApi({
environment: process.env.FGA_ENVIRONMENT,
storeId: process.env.FGA_STORE_ID,
clientId: process.env.FGA_CLIENT_ID,
clientSecret: process.env.FGA_CLIENT_SECRET,
});

// Run a check
const { allowed } = await fgaClient.check({
tuple_key: {
user: 'bob',
relation: 'viewer',
object: 'document:meeting_notes.doc',
},});

// allowed = true

Note

When creating relationship tuples for Auth0 FGA make sure to use unique ids for each object and user within your application domain. We're using first names and simple ids to just illustrate an easy-to-follow example.

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• More