Components and Instances

Components and Instances are defined in the security schema of modules and blocks within the PostNuke system. Each Module and Block which implements PostNuke security will define a set of "areas" or "instances" which are linked to tasks which can be performed in the Module/Block or things which are displayed in them. By using these components and instances in conjunction with the User, Group, and Level information, you can set up finely grained levels of administrative access to different parts of the system for different users.

Components

This is the part of the system you would like to set the permission for, and takes the form of a triplet separated by the colon (:) symbol. There are three types of component:

• System
  System components take the form of "system:area:instance" where area and instance are currently reserved.
• Block
  Block components take the form of "type:instance:action" where type is the block type ('Type' column on the blocks administration page) with 'block' appended to it, and instance and action are currently reserved.
• Module
  Module components take the form of "name:instance:area" where type is the name of the module (e.g. "Web Links", "Downloads"), instance is currently reserved, and area is the part of the module affected.

The component value is an anchored regular expression, so wildcards and other special characters can be used to match the names of components, areas, instances, etc. One commonly employed is the dot and asterisk (.*), which denotes "match any character zero or more times." In other words, when used as a value for the area in a Module component, this will mean that the permission applies to ALL areas of that component.

Instances

This is the part of the component that you wish to set the permission for, and takes the form of another triplet separated by the colon (:) symbol. The instance values are component-dependent; a list of instances for all currently installed modules and blocks is available by clicking on the words 'Component' or 'Instance' in the top row of the permissions table.