In Kentico deny access to a single page unless a use is in a particular role

Question

I've been wrestling with uniquely restricting one page in my Kentico installation to be viewed by only two Roles, everyone else should be redirected to a page telling them they need to jump over the paywall. I've not determined the best way yet to do this. Along the way I've found that when I try to access that page from the menu at the top of the page it respects my permission by denying access. However when I use that same link from an editable web part lower in the page it seems to ignore permissions. While it looks like two questions here what I really want to know is how to deny access unless a user is in a particular role and then if denied how do I redirect them to a page to explain why they were denied. Thanks.

Answer 1

Try this:

From your top level page (master page), add the role "Everyone" and grant them read access. This will replicate through the rest of the pages and everyone can see everything. Yes, sounds fishy but read on...

Next navigate to the specific page you want to restrict access to. On the Security tab, click the "Change permission inheritance" link. Then click the "Break inheritance and copy parent permissions". Next select the Everyone role and check the Deny full control box.

Now add your specific role(s) and set their permissions to Read.

This should get your permissions working as you want for that page.

As for a message and redirecting if in a particular role, you could place a webpart on a page and say if they are not part of a role, just redirect them to a page using your choice of redirects. The webpart itself will handle if they are in the particular role. Keep in mind the user will have to be logged in already and/or have access to that page so no restrictions can be on that page.

Answer 2

Thanks for all your suggestions. Here's what I found. First, the reason the two pages were acting differently was a brain cramp on my part. I had embedded two different links. My bad!

Secondly, on security, it appears that Deny takes precedence over Allow. If the role is denied no amount of "allow" will override the denial. The way I fixed the problem was to create a zone for those who I wanted to allow access to the text and a zone or web part for those I wanted to deny. In the Zone visibility section (click the arrow next to "Visible" to enter text) I put a boolean statement:

{% CurrentUser.IsInRole("Member") || CurrentUser.IsInRole("SecondRoleToTest") #%}

This way anyone who was in either of those two groups would cause a true value to this statement and visible would equal true (notice the"!"). For the zone or web part I wanted to present to those who was not a member of either of those to groups I put the opposite of that condition

{% !(CurrentUser.IsInRole("Member") || CurrentUser.IsInRole("SecondRoleToTest")) #%}

and it would display the materials for those who were not in either of those groups. In this case the text read the equivalent of "you need to be either this or that with a link to information on how they could become this or that". Have to admit I learned quite a bit on this one. Thanks for all your help, you helped lead me to the answer.

Answer 3

If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that you have locked down a page to only 2 roles? If a person clicks on a navigational link that is not in those roles, they are denied access...correct? But if a person clicks on a link from a webpart on a page, they are not denied access...correct?

Where this is unusual I am also wondering how the link is setup in the webpart? Is it just a anchor link or are you using a Kentico permalink? These should not behave any differently, but just a thought. Sounds like more than likely there is some permission that is still allowing access to the page, but without seeing your actual permissions setup it is really hard to tell you what could be causing that.

As far as redirect, by default it should redirect to a login page if you have one of those setup (you would of set that up in the Settings Tab), otherwise the access denied would just happen. You could quite easily write some custom code to redirect users who are not into a role to another page. For re-usability, you could write it into a custom webpart and have a property for the roles the users need to be in and a property for the redirect page location and then handle it from there. Doing it that way would allow you to use the same pattern on any pages you desired...but you would then need to bypass the built in security lock down stuff.

Lastly (and I don't know the classes to use) you could probably override what happens when 'access denied' occurs in accessing a page in the site..then you could do your own custom redirect. I am sure someone else can chime in with the exact class.