Pyramid and Role-Based Access Control

Sally Kleinfeldt, Alec Mitchell, Jesse Snyder

Length: Short Talk

Target Level: Intermediate

Target Audience: User, Developer

Ariadne Labs is a center for health systems innovation whose goal is to drive scalable solutions for better care. One of the projects at Ariadne Labs is the Better Evidence program, which provides free subscriptions to digital tools (such as the UpToDate decision support resource) to practitioners in developing countries. We assisted Ariadne in creating an improved Better Evidence website, making it easier for practitioners to apply and for administrators to review their applications. Although the application is long and involved and there are some interesting twists to the review process, this is basically a CRUD application that would have been suitable for a platform like Django except for one thing: the requirement for a placeful, role-based access control system. Because of this, we decided to use Pyramid. We will describe our solution, and contrast it with another Pyramid site with complex permission requirements, the Washington Trails Association's Volunteer Management System.