How does companies make staff users? - django

Apologies since this might not be the best way to word the question nor is this a coding question per say. I get the general process of creating a staff user within Django.
What I would like to know is if companies send email links that allow their workers to sign up a form to be a staff user or if the employer provides their details and someone on the backend creates this account for them, or some other process I am unaware of?

Well, most of the time they create you account with documents/personal info you've provided to the organization. In my university user accounts are created by staff(no need to fill forms and besides, you can fake that information). At the end, we just go to the website and login with provided credentials, we can add extra info/change password etc. in our account settings.
In conclusion, I would say, it depends.

Related

I would like to know how a non-admin account can use the Admin SDK

Sorry if my English is weird.
I would like to know how a non-admin account can use the Admin SDK.
If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
I'm developing an add-on for an elementary school using Google app script.
I want to limit the API by student, teacher, grade, etc. So I need to get the organization information.
There were a few other similar questions, and apparently it would be impossible to try to do it normally.
When using the Admin SDK, Google will display an acceptance confirmation screen to the user.
Once the user agrees, Google gives the app an access token that is valid for a short period of time. I'm thinking that I can do this by using that access token. Is this approach dangerous from a security point of view?
I'm sorry for the lack of explanation.
I'm currently developing a google slides add-on for an elementary school.
It's supposed to display a SPA made with vuejs in the sidebar and let you manipulate it.
For example, we can manage a whitelist of organizations that can use this application in advance, and not allow organizations that do not match the whitelist to use it.
If the organization is managed by school unit, access control can be done by domain, but in some areas, the organization is managed by city, so access control by school unit cannot be realized...
Also.We want to do the following if we match the whitelist.
The functions that can be used by teachers and students are
different.
The buttons can be changed depending on the grade level of the
students.
Automatically enter student names and class names on slides.
Use an organizational structure to manage the school and students. (https://support.google.com/a/answer/4352075?ref_topic=4390186&hl=en)
We think we can achieve this by using the Admin SDK to get organization information
Answer
It is not possible to use Admin SDK with a non-admin account as Google says in the documentation: This API gives administrators of Google Workspace domains (including resellers) the ability to manage devices, groups, users, and other entities in their domains.
However there are two workarounds for your problem, but you would need to use an admin account to configure the scenario.
Initial approach
Get the user that is running the application with the class Session and the method getActiveUser and getEmail: var email = Session.getActiveUser().getEmail();
Get the organizational unit that each user belongs to. With this information you will be able to filter users and display different options in the add-on. The main problem is that you need to use AdminDirectory.Users.get(userEmail) to get the organizational unit, and it needs the following authorization scope: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.user.readonly.
Solution 1
Create a Spreadsheet with all the users that are going to use the add-on and its organizational unit
Use List all users to get all the users in a domain and write each email in the first column.
Use AdminDirectory.Users.get(email).orgUnitPath to get the organizational unit and write it in the next column
Finally, when users use the add-on, search the email of the active user (Session.getActiveUser().getEmail()) in the Spreadsheet, take the row number and get the value of the organizational unit that is in the second column.
Solution 2
Create a custom admin role and assign it to every user that is going to use the add-on. You must be signed in as a super administrator for this task. You can do it here and select Users -> Read,
Assign the new role to each user creating a role assignment
Finally, users will be able to use var organization = AdminDirectory.Users.get(email).orgUnitPath

How to prevent staff users from editing/deleting superuser in django

I want to be able to allow certain staff users the rights to add other users and staff but what seems weird to me is that 1) a staff member can just change their own privileges to superuser or just make a new user and grant superuser privileges to them. 2) delete a superuser or revoke their superuser status
Some staff users should be able to modify/create/delete users but they should not be able to delete super users nor assign permissions to themselves or other users that they do not have the permission themselves.
This has always been logic I have incorporated into my user systems that I've written in PHP and I was just wondering if there was a way to change these settings in Django as I really like Python/Django (I'm just beginning to learn it) and can see myself migrating away from PHP. But part of the beauty for me lied in the admin panel and if that is something that cannot be changed, that's kind of cringe-worthy.
It reminds me of a restaurant POS system that I used to use when I was a GM. As the GM, I had powers that shift managers did not have. However, the shift managers could add a fingerprint to my profile (theirs) and then just log in as me and do anything they wanted to. I always felt this was a severe security breach and even took disciplinary action on an employee for doing this. It also allowed the shift managers to create new employees with titles that were above theirs which created the same problem as they could just create a new GM or Area Manager, login, do whatever they wanted, and see all kinds of things that they shouldn't (like their colleagues' salaries), and then hide (not delete) the user. (this is how he got caught)
If anyone has a fix or any ideas and suggestions, I'd love to hear them and keep learning this exciting new language. Thanks in advance!
Django admin is a basic CRUD system, it is not recommended to use in that way. Django views (your custom views) give you more power to control the process.
First of all, Django Permissions might be a good start point. Create Groups for user types and assign desired permissions for each group. Do not give permission for non-superusers to change group or permissions.
Second thing is using Django Signals to check data before saving it. For example, a pre_save signal for User creation can be used to check if is_superuser, is_staff values of the user are set by non-superuser. You can add added_by value to the user model and verify your checks using this value.
Also, using custom forms for Django admin is also possible and might be the simplest solution for it. Just make a custom form for creating and editing users and verify changes in the form directly before allowing the view to save anything. It is also possible to inform user that they don't have access for changes they made and also notify the management about the attempt.

Give specific permission per user when signing up

I am using allauth for registering users and I would like to give permissions to users automatically after they created a local account or using social login.
A good example would be only 1 user to be able to create posts and comments whilst the rest of the users to be able to only create comments.
Looking around I have seen that you can create Groups and through those you can give certain permissions, is this the right way to handle this? Or are there some better avenues worth exploring?
Many thanks.

Tracking anonymous users in Angular app

I am working on SPA AngularJS application which allows users to collaborate on projects and stores history of edits for each user. The requirement is to allow unauthenticated users to manipulate data too. Once the user registers, I need to associate her history of edits with the newly created account. The backend is Django.
What is the best option to track actions of anonymous users?
I can create “anonymous” user at the firs visit, issue JWT, store it in the browser and use to track all the user’s activity. Later on when registering user, just update her profile.
The drawback is that there is a potential to get a lot of orphaned users that need to be periodically cleaned up.
This is similar to https://github.com/danfairs/django-lazysignup, but adapted to work with https://github.com/GetBlimp/django-rest-framework-jwt.
Use JWT or cookie to track user session. Allow using session identifier instead of user key to track user’s activity. When creating real user update all references to the session with user’s pk.
Anything else?
From my experience go for solution 1. The orphan user is often not a problem because from business plan point of view it's user and the more is better.
Also having only a notion of user is really simpler. They are users who haven't fully completed their profile that's all.

Contrib.auth for occasional inquiries?

I have developed an app for school management. Teachers and others roles have an account (django user) to control student attendance, Behaviors issues, etc.
Student is a model itself. Teacher is a User proxy.
At this moment I'm ready to extend the app to allow parents access to children information (is cruel, but for the sake of students ;)
I'm evaluating this alternatives:
Make a simple php app only for parent access (with dedicated db user
and views). It seems secure but I don't like php.
Add a password field to Student model and build my owner authentication system. I
don't like to have a 'django authenticated student'.
Integrating Student authentication with actual auth schema. I don't like this for
security reason, this means to check all views security, and this mix teachers and students.
Create a new django application only for students (and parents) with two databases, the 'school' database and a new one with auth for students
What is for you the best way to authenticate parents before to see children information?
Any suggestions are wellcome. Thanks a lot.
Ah! I think that is easy that parents forgot passwords.
School has over 800 students, app store more than 1milion of presence cheks for year, lot of Parents interviews, ...
Django contrib.auth models incorporate groups and permissions in addition to user accounts. In fact regular django users and django admin users share the same model only with different permissions.
Considering, the default authentication model (from a security standpoint) is already shared with much bigger consequences in case of a breach, I don't see a reason why you shouldn't have students authenticate with the same model and just assign them into a separate group and manage their permissions. Your security will not be worse or better from what it already is.
As far as development side goes, all you have to do is simply use decorators on the view handlers which are Teachers/Parents only to limit student access to them.
See: Permissions decorator
If for whatever reason this is unacceptible (although I cannot surmise a reason from what you said), you will have to do either:
Write your own middleware that injects itself into contrib.auth (reinvent the wheel)
Use an external system to verify permissions (completely orthogonal to Django's approach and will actually complicate your system much more than to use integrated contrib.auth)
Additional down side to doing your own authentication system is that you now have to worry about all kind of security issues that Django solves for you (like CSRF protection, SQL injection/escaping and many others). Not to mention bugs that can creep in vs. using tested and proven code/model provided by contrib.auth.