Roles Management Module

Recently Ive been working on some systems that require several user types, Ill call them roles. Roles are essential to most applications because for one, youll want to have a hierarchy of users and what they can do in the system. Im sure most developers have already implemented this in some systems they develop. One of the vital aspects of a role is the permission. A permission is like a clearance for a user. A user must have permissions to have access to a specific part or parts in a system, this will later be referred to as access-levels.

A very good question is, why should we use a role module. I could mention a few that most of us are aware of.

1. Elimination of duplicate codes. Instead of re-creating sectionspages per user type we can create a single page with several conditions based on access-levels

2. Grouping of users. If you group users by roles it will be easier to categorize them and sort them by level in a hierarchy.

3. Ease of Use. When you change the access level or permission of a role, it will apply to all users under the role, thus you dont have to update each user.

Although the creation of a role module would take a lot more time in developing a system it will save you a lot of time later when it comes to providing a set of rules and limitations for a group of users.

There are several ways to implement a role module. Here is an example of a role-management module:

This image was taken from the project management tool Redmine.

I got the idea from Redmines role-management module and I tried to imitate it by creating my own. Here is my implementation of a role module.

And in the code

And that should suffice on how my role-management works. If you happen to know a better or a more efficient approach to this Id be more than glad to know about it.