# UserKit User's Guide

UserKit version 0.9.1

## Synopsis

UserKit provides for the management of users including passwords, user data, server-side archiving and caching. Users can be persisted on the server side via files or MiddleKit.

## Feedback

You can e-mail webware-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net to give feedback, discuss features and get help using UserKit.

## Introduction

UserKit is a self contained library and is generally not dependent on the rest of Webware. It does use a few functions in MiscUtils. The objects of interest in UserKit are Users, UserMangers, and Roles.

User – This represents a particular user and has a name, password, and various flags like isActive().

UserManager – Your application will create one instance of a UserManager and use to create and retrieve Users by name. The UserManager comes in several flavors depending on support for Roles, and where user data is stored. For storage, UserManagers can save the user records to either a flat file or a MiddleKit store. Also user managers may support Roles or not. If you don't need any roles and want the simplest UserManager, choose the UserManagerToFile which saves it's data to a file. If you want hierarchical roles and persistence to MiddleKit, choose RoleUserManagerToMiddleKit.

Roles – A role represents a permission that users may be granted. A user may belong to several roles, and this is queried using the method user.playsRole( theRole ). Roles can be hierarchical. For example a customers role may indicate permissions that customers have. A staff role may include the customers role, meaning that members of staff may also do anything that customers can do.

### Examples and More Details

The doc comments in UserManager.py is the first place to start. It describes all the methods in UserManager. Then go to the file Tests/ExampleTests.py which demonstrates how to create users, log them in, and see if they are members of a particular role.

Once you get the idea, the doc comments in the various files may be perused for more details.

### Encryption of Passwords

Generally one should never save users' passwords anywhere in plain text. However UserKit intentionally does no encryption of passwords. That is left to how you use UserKit in your application. See ExampleTests.py, for a demonstration of how easy this is using SHA digests to encrypt passwords. Basically you encrypt your password before you give it to UserKit. It is as simle as this:

    usermanager.createUser( 'johndoe', sha('buster').hexdigest() )

This design decision is to decouple UserKit from your particular encryption requirements, and allows you to use more advanced algorithms as they become available.

## Known Bugs

Known bugs and future work in general, are documented in TO DO.

## Credit

Author: Chuck Esterbrook, and a cast of dozens of volunteers.

Thanks to Tom Schwaller for design help.