Whether somebody with no account may see something was being answered one
feature at a time: a securesend_allow_guests setting, an enable flag per kiosk,
and very nearly a third for guides - each with its own settings page, its own
vocabulary and its own hand-written branch inside a route. Every one of them
answered a permissions question, and this app already administers permissions
per role.
So a caller with no token is not nobody: they hold the seeded `guest` role.
require_permission consults it when there is no identity, which is the entire
mechanism. The role is seeded holding NOTHING, so an upgrade opens no door; a
site opens one by ticking a box in the same grid it uses for every other role,
and closes it the same way. Revocation is read on every request rather than
cached, because taking guest access away is what somebody does the moment they
realise what they opened, and it has to bite immediately.
The redundant @jwt_required() above require_permission is gone from 184 routes.
It was belt-and-braces before; now it is actively wrong, because it refuses a
request with no token before the permission check can have an opinion, so a
grant would appear to do nothing.
What a guest may hold is bounded. Any .view or .read permission is grantable.
A WRITE has to be blessed by whoever owns it, through the new
get_guest_grantable_permissions hook (contract 0.21.0), and Secure Send is the
only case that exists: sending a password to a vendor is the one write this
product means to offer somebody who never signs in. Everything else is refused
by the API and greyed out in the grid rather than warned about - a checkbox
that quietly makes deleting an asset anonymous is not a warning anybody reads
twice. A guest write records no creator: the trail says when and from where,
never who, and that is the reason for the bar.
GE-Enforce and Slides gained read permissions so they can be opened to guests
without handing out the manage right. Their read routes accept either through
require_any_permission, so nothing an existing manager could reach has moved.
The navigation endpoint now returns only what the caller can actually reach.
Without that a signed-out visitor gets a sidebar of the whole app where every
link bounces off the login page, which reads as a broken site rather than as a
closed door. A nav item may name several permissions; holding any one is
enough, which is what GE-Enforce and Slides need now that a viewer and a
manager hold different strings.
Two things this found on the way: current_user is a LocalProxy, so
`current_user is None` is False for a request with nobody behind it - harmless
under a required JWT, an AttributeError the moment verification became
optional. And an image pasted into a guide before its first save was never
attached to it, so it was visible to editors and invisible to every reader;
saving now attaches it, and `flask guides fix-images` repairs what is stored.
The guides guest setting written earlier today is gone. Granting guides.view to
the guest role replaces it, which is the point.
The knowledgebase plugin is a link registry - a description, a URL and some
keywords pointing at a document held somewhere else. That leaves the documents
themselves as HTML files on a share: no search, no history, no way to know
whether the copy pinned to a noticeboard is current, and no way for a technician
to tick off where they are.
A guide is stored as an ordered list of typed blocks rather than a blob of
HTML, because three of the four things this feature exists for depend on it. A
tickable step needs a stable id to be remembered; dark mode needs semantic
markup rather than pasted colours; and print needs to know where a step begins
so it does not split one across a page. Free HTML gives none of that and lets
pasted styling fight the theme.
Inline text is a restricted Markdown subset - bold, italic, inline code, links,
line breaks - escaped BEFORE formatting, so nothing an author pasted can reach
the DOM as markup. No fonts, sizes or colours: emphasis is semantic and the
theme decides how it looks. That is what makes a guide written next year match
one written today, and dark mode work without an author thinking about it.
DRAFTS AND VERSIONS. The guide row is the working copy; every save that changes
something writes an immutable revision; and a separate pointer says which
revision READERS get. Without that pointer, editing a live procedure changes it
under a technician who is halfway through following it. Publishing promotes an
existing revision rather than snapshotting, so a publish with unsaved edits
cannot ship a version nobody reviewed. Restoring writes a new revision with old
content, so the record of what people were told in between survives.
Saves dedup on a content hash covering title, summary, tags and blocks, so an
autosave that changed nothing writes no version - otherwise the history fills
with identical entries and hides the three edits that mattered.
Progress lives in the browser, not the database: shopfloor PCs share a login, so
per-user ticks would show one technician's progress to the next person on that
bay, which reads as "already done". Keyed by guide and version, because step 4
of version 3 is not step 4 of version 2.
Five permissions, and the split between edit and publish is the point: a
technician can write a procedure up while somebody else decides it is fit for
the floor. create-without-edit works too - an author may edit their own guide
until it is published, after which other people are following it.
