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I'm going to assume we all looked at (and were confused by) the Cake Manual Tutorial on Access Control. I'll also assume you all want to know how you might practically use Cake AC to implement User and Group permissions.

Cake Acces control was not made specifically for User/Group permissions control. It is simply a generic access control system to be used for anything. It can be used for User/Group permissions, but we have a bit of work to do to figure out exactly how.

Understanding the concepts

How can Cake AC be used for User and Group permissions? Lets simplify things, by talking in terminology that we all understand...

ARO (Access Request Objects) = Users or Groups

1. link_id = User ID (or 0 if it is a Group)
2. parent_id = Id of Group that a User Belongs to
3. alias = Unique Id/Name of Users and Groups

ACO (Access Control Objects) = Your Controllers or Actions

1. link_id = A Unique Page Id (I have no idea what that is)
2. parent_id = Id of Controller that an Action belongs to
3. alias = Unique Id/Name of Controlers or Actions

ACL (Access Control List) = List that holds User/Group data access restrictions to Controllers and Actions

1. aro = Your user or group
2. aco = your controllers or actions
3. action = You define the actions, generally read, write, etc..

So some things of concern here, now that we have this in english.

While Cake AC does not force aliases of anything to be Unique.. well as you might expect, you do run into problems if they are not unique. What will happen if you have a User named 'Smith' and you are putting him into a group called 'Smith'? Well, unless you add something, the system will wonder why you are trying to make 'Smith' a parent of himself.

So with that all said, I set my system up so that references to Users were always made with the users Unique Id (ARO link_id) and references to Groups were made with the Group name (ARO alias)
Download code // set user with id 2 to be part of the group 'admins'
$aro->setParent('Admins', 2); 
// just made sure no groups or users ever have numbers for names, and you are safe The same problem exists with ACO's. If you have your pages treed in controller/action format. When you go to put the home/home (controller/action) page into permisions, well.. the system will wonder why you are trying to make home a parent of itself. I have not figured out how to identify controllers or actions with numbers, so perhaps adding a convention will help.
Download code // set home action to be a child of the home controller
$aco->setParent('home/home', 'home');  So be careful when using Cake access control for User Permissions, it can work, you just have to be careful.

Putting this into your App

Well, perhaps a real world example of making sure access is controlled would look like this...

You would never write the following code out (I don't think). Likely you would want a full system where the following data is created using form input from a user.
Download code $aro = new Aro(); // users and groups
$aco = new Aco(); // controllers and actions

// add some users and groups to the system
// it is assumed you have your own table of user, with their own information
$aro->create( 1, null, 'John Smith' ); // 1=user_id, null=parent
$aro->create( 2, null, 'Millie Thompson');

$aro->create(0, null, 'Admins'); // group
$aro->create(0, null, 'Managers'); //group

//set John to be an admin
$aro->setParent('Admins', 1);
// set Millie to be an manager
$aro->setParent('Managers', 2);

$aco->create(0, null, 'Home/home');
In one of your controllers you can do something that looks like this
Download code $this->Acl->allow('Admins', 'Home/home', 'read');
$this->Acl->deny('Managers', 'Home/home');
There, now John can get into home/home and Millie cannot.

After you set up your data, this is practical code, that you might actually write. It will automatically allow or deny the logged in user access to a given action.
Download code class AppController extends Controller {
    
    var $components = array('Acl');

    function beforeFilter() {
        // next line will change depending on your auth system
        // basically getting the Id of the currently logged in user
        $user_id = $this->obAuth->getUserId(); 

        $page = $this->name.DS.$this->action; 
        $access = $this->Acl->check($user_id, $page, 'read');

        //access denied (if we are in Home/home, this is Millie)
        if ($access === false) { 
            echo "access denied";
            exit;
        }
        
        //access allowed (if we are in Home/home, this is John)
        else {
            echo "access allowed";
            exit;
        }
    }

} I'll leave it up to you to set up your own permsissions, and groups in a real life system. This does give you a good overview of the concepts though.

There is an ACL management plugin on CakeForge which might help you. Currently it is still young and in development. It might help automate a lot of these things for you.