ADR 0001 - Actors¶
Status¶
Accepted
Context¶
There are different kinds of actors that need to interact with Marsha.
First we have the people managing a Marsha instance.
Then we have people linking their own website (this website is a “consumer site”) to a Marsha instance, to host videos.
These consumer sites can host many publishers. We call these “organizations”. And these organizations have managers that can administrate some things about authors, video sharing between authors…
Next we have the video authors, belonging to the organizations.
And finally we have the users coming to watch videos.
Decision¶
Let’s separate those 5 actors / roles:
“staff”¶
Purpose¶
To manage a Marsha instance
Implementation¶
These are simply instances of the Django User model, with the flag is_staff set to True.
“admins”¶
Purpose¶
To manage the link between a consumer site and a Marsha instance, and the organizations allowed to access this consumer site on the instance.
Implementation¶
To represent a consumer site on a Marsha instance, we have a ConsumerSite Django model. With a ManyToMany link to the User model, named admins (not a single admin, to avoid having no admin if the only one existing is not available anymore)).
“managers”¶
Purpose¶
To manage the authors in the organization (an organization could be present on many consumer sites). To allow videos to be private to authors or public for all authors. And create courses.
Implementation¶
To represent an organization on a Marsha instance, we have an Organization Django model. With a ManyToMany link to the User model, named managers.
“authors”¶
Purpose¶
To post videos on a Marsha instance to be used on a consumer site.
Implementation¶
An author is simply an instance of the User model, but has a link to an Organization via a ManyToMany link, named organizations (we can imagine an author working for many organizations).
“viewers”¶
Purpose¶
To watch videos hosted on a Marsha instance.
Implementation¶
For the viewers we don’t need to save anything in the database, so there is no instances of the User Django model for them.
Each time a user does an action to view a video, they access it via a url containing a unique token, with a limited life span. It’s this token that grant them access to the video.
This is not the scope of this document to address token generations.
To store the user preferences regarding languages, video resolution, etc, it can simply be done via a cookie.