Roles

The WebSphere Commerce system provides a default set of roles for the following groups:

Note: The buyer (buy-side) role is an individual who makes purchases from the seller on behalf of some customer account. Usually purchases are made under one or more agreements negotiated with the seller. The buyer interacts with the seller's Web site to make purchases.

The Member subsystem supports assigning these roles, as well as any new roles created by the Site Administrator, by organizational entity; that is, users who belong to an organizational entity can take on roles assigned to that organizational entity.

The Member subsystem also supports assigning roles to users. When a user is assigned a role, the role is scoped to organizational entity so that user plays that role with respect to one or more organizational entities. When a user is assigned a role, the user does not necessarily play that role for the organizational entity to which they belong; that is, when an administrator performs the assignment, the administrator can select which organizational entity for which the user plays that role. If the administrator selects the Root Organization, the user plays that role for all the organizational entities.

By default, only users with specific roles are authorized to perform role assignment, as follows:

Every user in the Member subsystem has an attribute called RegisterType, which can have one of four valid values as follows:

Registration type Description
S User has been assigned the Site Administrator or Channel Manager roles.
A User has been assigned certain roles within the Seller organization, such as Operations Manager, Customer Service Representative, or Seller Administrator.

A default implicit member group called Administrators is shipped with WebSphere Commerce with the above list of roles defined as criteria.

During role assignment and unassignment, if the role being assigned or unassigned is an administrative role, the value of RegisterType will be set accordingly to maintain consistency.

R Registered user. A user who has registered and provided WebSphere Commerce with some profile data.
G Guest user. A user who has not registered.

The value of 'A' is role-related while the values of 'R' and 'G' are related to whether or not the user has registered.

Important: Although 'A' is supported as valid values for RegistrationType, in a future version of WebSphere Commerce, they may be separated from RegisterType and become values of a different attribute. Consequently, code should not be written to depend on'A' being the value of the RegisterType attribute. If code needs to be written to examine the role or registration type of a user, such code should be replaced by access control policies or written to use appropriate APIs instead.

All roles are defined in the ROLE table, and are automatically assigned to the Root Organization. The MBRROLE table contain role assignment information for users and organizational entities. In addition, the MBRGRP and MBRGRPCOND database tables store other role related information.