2024-02-13 Product big-picture meeting

External anonymous sharing

• When sharing a table externally to anonymous users, should I be able to choose a DB role for the share?

  • Scenario:
    • Tech company ‘Stack Underflow’ has a table with the results of their survey of popular programming languages, called Survey results.
    • Employees of the tech company should be able to perform DDL and DML operations on the Survey results table.
    • They want to share this Survey results table to the public. The share should be restricted to only allow “read-only” view of the table.
    • For safety reasons, they create a new role on the DB called ‘readonly_role’ and grant it access to only view the table.
    • They generate a URL to share the table.They choose the ‘readonly_role’ and associate it with the share.
    • Anonymous users viewing the URL should be presented with a read-only view of the Survey results table. The underlying DB request should utilize the ‘readonly_role’.
    • Tech company employees should also be able to view the url to get a sense of how it will look before sending the url to others. They should be able to do this while they’re still logged into Mathesar.
  • Are we all agreed that we need to support this?
  • How would this work on the backend?
  • Similar scearnio applies for Mathesar objects like explorations. How would the solution work for them?

• Can the same table be publicly shared multiple times by multiple users, generating multiple urls? If so, who all should be able to view the shared url list?

  • Scenario:
    • Event management company has multiple clients. They get orders for conference management and manage events on behalf of their clients.
    • They have DB roles for each of their clients. Let’s say they have two clients and associated roles, for ‘RSA Conference team - USA’, and ‘Presidential debate team’.
    • They manage their conference attendees contact information list in a single table, with an RLS policy.
    • The ‘RSA Conference team - USA’ role would only be able to view the list of attendees for their conference and not any other conferences, when they query the table.
    • Event management company connects their DB to Mathesar, gives access to ‘RSA Conference team - USA’ and ‘Presidential debate team’ with their respective roles.
    • ‘RSA Conference team’ shares the attendees table with a public URL link. The ‘Presendital debate team’ should not be able to see the link listed in the Mathesar UI.
  • Are we all agreed that we need to support this?
  • How would this work on the backend?
  • How would the follow-up scenario work?
    • Now, there’s a ‘RSA Conference global team’ that wants to conduct conferences across different countries. The Event Management company creates a DB role for them. They should be able to view the attendees of all the RSA conference sub-teams that manage single countries.
    • They should be able to view the list of links shared by the RSA sub teams for the attendees table.
  • Similar scenarnio applies for Mathesar objects like explorations. How would the solution work for them?

External sharing to Mathesar users

• Should we allow sharing a table/exploration with the restriction that the human should be logged into a Mathesar account, but they don’t necessarily need to have a DB role explicitly configured and shouldn’t be able to view anything else in Mathesar?
  • Scenario:
    • Person conducts an internal survey within their company. They create and share a public URL.
    • They want whomever editing the table (or in the future, forms) to be a valid Mathesar user to prevent people from outside the organization to edit the data.
    • They don’t want these users to browse the database via Mathesar. They simply want them to access one single table (or form) and only via the URL.
  • Are we all agreed that we need to support this?
    • We’re not going to support this
  • How would this work on the backend?

Implicit sharing between Mathesar users for co-ordination

• When a database is connected to Mathesar how should access control work for Mathesar users to access it?
• Do we need to move away from our existing setup where each connection is a single DB user? Why?
• The main reason is for sharing Mathesar objects. Can we do this another way?
• Should an exploration/Mathesasr object ownership be tied to a human or the DB role?
• Should we provide access control options for structural level changes to explorations/Mathesar objects? Can we restrict this to owner-only?
• Do we need private explorations that only one Mathesar user owns?
• Do we need a team space where everyone co-owns items in the team space?
  • Do we need further access-control within a team space?
• Should we allow multiple projects/wrappers for the same DB?
  • Scenario: Multi-tenant setups.