Documentation for Crowd 2.0.x. Documentation for other versions of Crowd is available too.

This page introduces you to groups and roles in Crowd.

About Groups and Roles

Groups and roles are known as permission container objects. Groups are particularly important in Crowd, as they are often used to control access to applications. Note also that the crowd-administrators group confers Crowd administration rights to its members.

Roles are used less frequently, depending on the requirements of individual applications.

Crowd's role-based access control could be enhanced

At present, the implementation of roles in Crowd is identical to the implementation of groups. Additional development work would be needed to differentiate the functionality of roles from groups. If you would like to help us to design better role-based access control, please add a comment to the improvement request CWD-931, letting us know how you would like to see it work.

About nested groups

Some user directories allow you to define a group as a member of another group. Groups in such a structure are called 'nested groups'. In Crowd, you can map any group to an application, including a group which contains other groups. Crowd supports nested groups for LDAP directory connectors, Crowd internal directories, Delegated Authentication directories and custom directories. You can enable or disable support for nested groups on each directory individually. For more information, refer to the documentation on configuring a directory.

For more details about nested groups, refer to Nested Groups in Crowd.

About the Group Browser and the Role Browser

The Group Browser and the Role Browser are very similar. They allow you to search, view, add and edit the various groups and roles stored within a specified directory.

To use the Group Browser,

  1. Log in to the Crowd Administration Console.
  2. Click the 'Groups' tab in the top navigation bar.
  3. The Group Browser will appear. Select the directory in which you are interested, then click the 'Search' button to list all the groups that exist in that directory.
    You can refine your search by specifying a 'Name' or by choosing 'Active' or 'Inactive' groups.
  4. To view or edit a group's details, click the link on the group name.
  5. Click the 'Direct Members' tab to view the immediate members of the group, including users and other groups.
  6. Click the 'Nested Members' tab to view all users who are included in the group and in its sub-groups
  7. You can read more about group members in Managing Group Members.


Screenshot 1: Group Browser




Screenshot 2: Viewing and updating group details



RELATED TOPICS

Crowd Documentation

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