Content change listener similar to Upload Listener Service

[henninglosert]

Hi there,

I am currently implementing permissions management for an AEMaaCS system that will have a large number of different user groups. The AC Tool feature to base permissions on content comes in really handy here. I am basing my permissions on the folder structure that needs to be created for each user group anyway.

The challenge I see with this approach: After creating the necessary folder structure, someone needs to manually trigger AC Tool to run and create the defined user groups and permissions.

AC Tool already has an Upload Listener Service (which I also use to be able to update AC Tool config at runtime). However, this listener only detects changes to the config files. Creating new folders as described above does not require any changes to the config, but will result in new groups/ACEs to be created once AC Tool runs again.

I will probably create a JCR event listener for my specific use case. My goal is to make it possible for a user admin to onboard new user groups to the system without needing to run AC Tool manually (and ideally without requiring that user admin to have the permissions necessary to run AC Tool).

I think it would be really cool to have a generic mechanism in AC Tool that could handle this. Since only certain syntax constructs would make this necessary (namely "FOR ... IN CHILDREN OF"), it should be possible to extract relevant content paths from AC Tool config.
Of course I see that this is non-trivial and I can't really judge what could be affected by this, so just putting this idea out there.

What do you think?

Cheers
Henning