SOLR Permissions / Filtering Results depending on Access Rights

Question

For example I have Documents A, B, C. User 1 must only be able to see Documents A, B. User 2 must only be able to see Document C. Is it possible to do it in SOLR without filteri

Answer 1

I would suggest storing the access roles (yes, its plural) as document metadata. Here the required field access_roles is a facet-able multi-valued string field.

Doc1: access_roles:[user_jane, manager_vienna] // Jane and the Vienna branch manager may see it
Doc2: access_roles:[user_john, manager_vienna, special_team] // Jane, the Vienna branch manager and a member of special team may see it

The user owning the document is a default access role for that document.

To change the access roles of a document, you edit access_roles.

---

When Jane searches, the access roles she belongs to will be part of the query. Solr will retrieve only the documents that match the user's access role.

When Jane (user_jane), manager at vienna office (manager_vienna) searches, her searches go like:

q=mainquery
&fq=access_roles:user_jane
&fq=access_roles:manager_vienna
&facet=on
&facet.field=access_roles

which fetches all documents which contains user_jane OR manager_vienna in access_roles; Doc1 and Doc2.

When Bob, (user_bob), member of a special team (specia_team) searches,

q=mainquery
&fq=access_roles:user_bob
&fq=access_roles:special_team
&facet=on
&facet.field=access_roles

which fetches Doc2 for him.

Queries adapted from http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SimpleFacetParameters#Multi-Select_Faceting_and_LocalParams