Attribute based administration

Attribute Based Administration provides a facility to customize the layout of a page for individual user by using rules to show or hide pages or page. You can create a visiblity rule that will check value of "department" attribute stored in LDAP and use it either show or hide particular page or portlet. You can also use values such as todays date or day to show or hide content.

Access Control and Visibility Rules both impact what appears on a portal page or portlet. Access Control determines what a user is allowed to see on a page or in a portlet. In order to see pages and portlets, a user must be explicitly defined as a member of the group that has access. The groups are arranged in a hierarchy and each group is assigned roles such as administrators or editors.

Access Control takes precedent over visibility rules. You must have access to a page or portlet before visibility rules can be applied. Access Control also determines if a page or portlet will be returned in a search; if a user does not have access, he will not be able to see the portlet or page in search results. If a user has access to a portlet or page, but has the visibility rule set to hide the page or portlet, it will show up in search results.

There are two ways to assign a visibility rules to either page or portlet.

Using Portal Admin Console

You can show or hide portal page using the Page properties portlet like this


You can show or hide portlet using the Edit Layout portlet like this

Using XML Access COnfiguration

Using the XML configuration interface, you can assign a rule to a page or portlet. Set the parameter com.ibm.portal.navigation.rule to indicate the rule to assign to the page or portlet. The value of the parameter should be the unique id or UUID of the rule. The UUID can be found by exporting the rule in the Personalization user interface and inspecting the exported XML for the jcr:uuid parameter.

For example, to assign a rule with the UUID 7ce9d5004ee31f41b0d3b944c9f7965c to a page or portlet, add the following parameter to the content-node in the XML access script:

<parameter name="com.ibm.portal.navigation.rule" type="string" update="set"><![CDATA[7ce9d5004ee31f41b0d3b944c9f7965c]]</parameter>