Understanding the permission Model in Liferay (Technically)

2025-04-08T15:22:02Z

I was asked to provide a list of all pages in a site, and show what permissions each role had on the page. Getting the list of Pages (aka. Layouts) id fairly easy to do, however, as was the getting of the Permissions for a page/layout. What was not clear at all, and what I spent hours looking for was a description of how this all works technically, so that I could gain access to this from groovy.

Turns out that the Permission actions are the important part, but they are linked via a bitwise process, to simplify and increase performance when doing permission checking. THis is not uncommon, but a simple one liner could've provided this information to me, and saved me hours of messing around, once I understood this, there was then a need to develop a specific piece of code to get access to this data. This seems like a common thing to want to do, so I would guess that buried somewhere in the Liferay code is exactly this, but, again, it's not obvious where to even look.

The only clue I could find on this when Googling was: http://www.liferaysavvy.com/2013/02/liferay-permission-system-detailed.html

Which is a really old link, this link does however have two 'Liferay' links, one of which is no longer available, and the other, that could be useful, but was no where to be found when searching on Google (This link also takes an age to load, most people would've navigated away, but the time it took to load, I nearly did!)