Supporting entailment constraints in the context of collaborative web applications

Abstract

Collaborative Web applications allow several users to collaboratively work on the same artifact. In addition to popular use cases, such as collaborative text editing, they can also be used for formbased business applications that often require forms to be filled out by different stakeholders or stakeholder roles. In this context, the different stakeholders often need to fill in different parts of the forms. For example, in an e-health application a nurse might fill in the details and a doctor needs to sign them. Role-based access control and entailment constraints provide means for defining such restrictions. So far entailment constraint have mainly been studied in the context of workflow-based architectures, but not for collaborative Web applications. We present a generic approach for the specification and enforcement of entailment constraints in collaborative Web applications that supports their real-time nature and the non-prescriptive order in which tasks can be performed. Further, we discuss a model-driven implementation approach of our concepts and lessons learned and limitations.

Automatic enforcement of constraints in real-time collaborative architectural decision making

“…It is based on previously presented work. More precisely, the tool is built upon the foundations of ADvISE (Architectural Design Decision Support Framework) (Lytra et al, 2013) and CoCoForm (Constrainable Collaborative Form) (Gaubatz and Zdun, 2013), a real-time collaborative Web application framework. The main concepts of our approach are shown in Fig.…”

Supporting Customized Views for Enforcing Access Control Constraints in Real-Time Collaborative Web Applications

“…The View Service is implemented as a plain HTTP Service in Java, using the JAX-RS API 7 , and the configurations are returned in JSON format. The central RBAC Service, which is utilized by the View Service, has been presented in previous work [7]. We use a model-driven approach for defining forms and securing them using access control constraints.…”

“…In addition to such popular examples, the real-time collaboration approach can also be used in typical business applications that often require multiple forms to be filled out by different stakeholders [7]. A crucial -though in the context of realtime collaborative Web applications often neglected -aspect of these business applications is access control.…”

“…The data entry procedure is typically included in a business process with well-defined roles and responsibilities (see, e.g., [9]). In previous work, we presented CoCoForm [7], a real-time collaborative Web application framework in which several users can concurrently fill out HTML forms. Figure 1 shows a simplified example of using CoCoForm in the e-health domain.…”

Enforcing entailment constraints in offline editing scenarios for real-time collaborative web documents

“…To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. of collaborative Web applications today, their use in typical business contexts is limited as many business applications usually deal with strict, standardized forms with precisely specified text fields (see, e.g., [11]). Another crucial aspect of business applications is access control.…”